At the start of this season, I wrote about my mental health struggles. My hope that another season covering the Dallas Mavericks at MavsMoneyBall would lift my spirits turned out to be a mixed bag. While I respect and adore my colleagues (our Slack chats are legendary), there was more to my optimism than writing posts for the site.
The Mavs were coming off a run to the NBA Finals (or “the championship games” if you prefer). It was not farfetched to think this team had a legitimate shot to make a return to the biggest stage in the basketball world. They had crafted a legitimate title contender around Luka Doncic, who was entering his seventh season and would not turn 26 until the playoffs were again in sight. The front office had made upgrades to the roster to address the team’s weaknesses in perimeter shooting and secondary playmaking with Klay Thompson, Naji Marshall, and Quentin Grimes.
Fast-forward to the present moment, and the season feels like a cruel April Fool’s Day joke stretched out over an entire regular season. Doncic is gone to forever wear purple and gold all the way to the Naismith. Grimes is the best player on the Sixers. Kyrie Irving is on a long road to recovery and somehow has more leverage than ever over Dallas despite his return to star-level play being a glaring uncertainty.
Anthony Davis is a great player, a Hall-of-Fame player. Yet Monday night’s 113-109 home loss to the woeful Brooklyn Nets showed how vulnerable this roster now is to shooting variance - no longer having a pair of the best offensive engines the game has ever seen. The last possession with the game still on the line spoke volumes, a pump fake three in the corner from Klay Thompson and a long ranger from Spencer Dinwiddie that nearly went in. No mismatch was created because the two gravitational forces - Doncic and Irving - that dictated terms during key possessions are now playing elsewhere and sidelined, respectively.
This team never gave up this season amid the hardship of injuries, illness, and unprecedented levels of drama, which is commendable. It is also true that the franchise faces uncertainty, and the fanbase is fractured in a way that not even a title dropping out of the sky could fully heal. If you are a Dallas Mavericks fan, you probably sit in one of three categories. Your personality, your relationship with fandom generally, and a host of other factors have caused one of these three reactions. It will take at least a generation to fully galvanize what was a united throng of global fans, until just a few weeks ago.
Done with this team
When news of the Doncic trade broke, you could quickly see the fault lines emerging. A portion of the fanbase died on the vine - season ticket holders cancelled, fans switched allegiances from Maverick blue to Laker gold, while others have given up on the NBA altogether.
Will they ever return? While a small portion may find their way back when the franchise sees brighter days, it is reasonable to postulate that fans who began to root for Dallas when Luka Doncic arrived have little reason to ever consider giving this organization a second chance, even after it has a new front office and even a new owner.
The era of “loyalty never fades away” ended on February 1st in the early morning hours. The unbridled empowerment of Nico Harrison tore that culture asunder in the eyes of those who are never coming back. Comments made by Harrison, Dumont, and Welts parrot a similar framing. To paraphrase, we are going to win back your trust by winning championships. Hogwash.
2011 taught us how rare and special winning a title truly is. What if the comeback in Game 2 falls short? What if Jet’s dagger three over LeBron clanks off the rim? A thousand what-ifs going the Mavericks' way during that run keeps the organization from still searching for their first Larry O’Brien trophy to this day. Franchises aim for contention, for relevance, and then simply hope. Winning a championship is not something you can order at the drive-thru window like getting your fries animal style. More importantly, dangling the idea of a championship to curry favor with your fanbase is beyond tone deaf given the roster, salary cap, and draft capital realities.
Even if Dumont and Harrison could snap their fingers and plop a title banner onto midcourt at the AAC, the former fans in this category would not return and couldn't care less.
Move on already
This second faction staked out their ideological territory in the opening hours after the Shams bomb was heard around the world. Luka was gone and good riddance, some were saying. Davis is going to make the Mavericks' defense elite. If you listened carefully to these voices, the Mavericks low-key won the trade. Nico is a sneaky genius, they murmured.
There is little doubt that if Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving had both stayed healthy and Dallas was in contention for a top-six seed, these voices would be far louder at this point. Even still, a quick trip to social media is replete with exasperation from the “move on already” brigade. Unable to define the trade as a positive as easily as expected, this lot now settles for chastising others for lamenting a trade that cannot be undone. They see the constant languishing as a maudlin and fruitless exercise.
“You have to move on eventually,” they proclaim - a mere two months after a franchise-defining decision widely regarded as the worst trade in league history. If you are in this camp, it may not be that you like the move but you detest what you perceive as “wallowing in it” and you are just ready to move on - even if that means moving into an uncertain number of years in basketball wilderness once the Nico Harrison era ends - likely before the end of the decade. The team projects to be in an asset-barren rebuild as they prepare to move into a new arena. Insert Picard facepalm meme here. Yikes.
Driving with the Brakes On
There was a time when I thought CDs would be forever on my shelf and not in boxes down in my garage. I spent an embarrassing amount of money as a teenager and into my twenties experiencing new music by buying CDs every week in an array of genres. The best part of popping that silver disc into the dash was discovering the deeper tracks that radio never played.
Around thirty years ago, Del Amitri had their biggest hit with Roll to Me - a syrupy sweet, upbeat love note that was perfect for radio play ad nauseam at a nifty 2:13 runtime. Deeper on that album was a song that has stuck with me for thirty years. “Driving with the Brakes On” is an ode to the conflicted nature of a love embroiled in such wrenching chaos that you want to stay and leave at once with near equal desire. “When you’re driving with the brakes on, when you’re swimming with your boots on, It’s hard to say you love someone and it’s hard to say you don’t.”
For this third group of Mavericks fandom - myself among them - we have not left the building, but we understand the Fire Nico chants even if we aren’t the ones yelling it as a meme at venues around DFW.
“When you’re driving with the brakes on, when you’re swimming with your boots on, It’s hard to say you love someone and it’s hard to say you don’t”- Driving with the Brakes on | Del Amitri | album: Twisted, 1995
The phrase MFFL - Mavs Fan for Life - first came into the consciousness shortly after Mark Cuban bought the team. It was a clunky but ultimately endearing bit of marketing that propped up the idea that loyalty to a then floundering franchise was something worth cultivating and clutching tightly even during the rough times.
For those of us driving with the brakes on, our status as MFFLs has never been quite so strained. There are players on this team we still have fondness for, and there may be a playoff series or two to enjoy before it all flies apart in a twister of inevitable karmic blowback. Yet there is a reason we are not done with this team and an equally powerful reason we are unable to simply move on from this trade.
I have been a Dallas Mavericks fan since 1980 when I was five years old and I will be damned if a shoe salesman who Peter Princple’d his way into the front office and basketball neophyte owner are going to rob me of my Mavericks fandom.
Equally powerful is the reality before us. The Game of Thrones concept of “The Long Night” is just a season or two away. Kidd and Harrison will not be around for the near barren cupboard desolation that will follow their almost certainly doomed experiment. Cooper Flagg is not coming to save Dallas in this year’s draft, nor does the team control its first-round picks from 2027 to 2030. The price for Harrison’s blunder and Dumont’s gullibility will be paid in years of losing long after they are gone. That is why those of us driving with the brakes on cannot simply move on from our fixation with the trade and its fallout.
No matter which of these three groups you most closely identify with, I have nothing but love for you because you are coping with all of this the best you can and responding to it all authentically. I would simply ask you to keep in mind that there are fans in the other two groups experiencing something just as valid.
The song from Del Amitri ultimately makes a declaration once it hits the thumper of a bridge. “But unless the moon falls tonight | Unless continents collide | Nothing’s gonna make me break from her side.”
I remain a fan of the Dallas Mavericks and a proud member of the MavsMoneyBall staff. I also yearn for the day when Nico Harrison, Jason Kidd, and Patrick Dumont’s era is shuffled into the dustbin of franchise history. Those two things are both true because - at least for now - some of us are driving with the brakes on.