On Luka Dončić, Joel Embiid, and a wild start to the NBA trade deadline

Every so often, a decision is made that so defies the bounds of good sense, it leaves you with no other choice but to conclude that the decision really does make sense and the problem is you.

Perhaps then it’s best to view the Luka Dončić trade not as the most shocking and bizarre in NBA history but as the standard-bearer for a post-historic era of inverted reality such as the one in which we are living. America in 2025: The less sense something makes, the more it proves its own validity. The wisdom of any action is secondary to the reaction it induces. The greatest of the virtues is to troll thy neighbor. The chaos is the point.

From that perspective, the Mavericks have won the weekend going away. Such was the unanimity of the reaction to their trade of Dončić under the cover of darkness late Saturday night, in exchange for whatever the Lakers could spare, so long as it wasn’t too much of an imposition. The official return for Dončić, an MVP finalist and conference finals MVP at the age of 25 last season, was almost-32-year-old All-Star big man Anthony Davis and a first-round pick. The draft pick, the Lakers’ selection in 2029, offers a tidy encapsulation of the confusion surrounding the move. Davis will be 36 years old when the pick comes due in four years. His new running mate with the Mavericks, All-Star guard Kyrie Irving, will be 37. Dončić, meanwhile, will be 30, still in his mid-prime, still presumably anchoring a contending Lakers team, still a year younger than Davis is now.

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The overwhelming reaction on Sunday morning, at least among those who went to bed before midnight, was like a large-scale reenactment of that viral Don Draper montage, a society-wide chorus line of a disdainfully toned “What?!”

When NBA house correspondent Shams Charania first tweeted the news, most people assumed it would be followed by a link to buy a cryptocurrency meme coin. After Charania confirmed that it was legitimate, the assumption became that it was actually Nico Harrison’s brain that had been hacked. But then Harrison himself spoke, and confirmed that the decision to trade Dončić was made on his own free will. In fact, the Mavericks' president/general manager spoke as if the trade of Dončić wasn’t the story at all, and that history would regard it as The Anthony Davis Trade.

“It’s something we believe in as an organization that’s going to make us better,” Harrison said. “We believed it sets us up to win not only now but in the future. And when we win, I believe the frustration will go away.”

It was an impressive statement on a lot of different levels, most notably in its ability to so concisely relay so many different pieces of illogical thinking. While Davis is widely regarded as a very good NBA player, Dončić is one of a small handful of superstars who can serve as a singular anchor of a championship contender, unquestionably one of the top five to 10 players in the sport and one of the three or four unique franchise pillars in the NBA.

He belongs to that grouping of players who define a sport in any given generation: Bird-Magic-MJ-Malone, Wilt-Russell-West-Robertson, Kareem-Dr. J-Gervin-Moses. There is a more-than-reasonable chance that, by the time Dončić reaches Davis’ current age, the sport will be his and his alone.

Which brings us to the second issue with Harrison’s line of thought. Even if Dallas is correct in its belief that pairing Davis and Irving will immediately position the team to win now, by what measure of time can one possibly use to argue that trading away a 25-year-old (Dončić will be 26 on Feb. 28) for a 31-year-old (Davis will be 32 on March 11) sets the team up to win “not only now but in the future?”

» READ MORE: Sixers stunned by Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis blockbuster trade: ‘Anything can happen’

Then, we have the most glaring hole in Harrison’s line of reasoning: The Mavericks already had a win-now player in Dončić. He led them to the NBA Finals just last year.

There must be more to the story, right? Any attempt to rationalize everything we know leaves our minds twisted into such a pretzel that we can do little else but seek comfort in the notion that somebody knows something we don’t.

The one faint flicker of reason from Harrison and the Mavs is one that burns brightest when held up to the Sixers’ current straits. Reports have surfaced that suggest Dallas was uncomfortable with Dončić’s conditioning, and that the organization was nervous about giving him a supermax extension this summer given its questions about how his body will hold up over time. It is an easy thing to brush off as the cynical posturing of a public perception loser. But you can’t help but wonder about the extent to which the Mavericks’ decision-making was informed by Joel Embiid’s free fall toward sunk-cost status in the wake of his offseason contract extension with the Sixers.

On the one hand, Embiid and Dončić are drastically different players with drastically different injury track records. Dončić averaged 67 games played from 2021-24, never missing more than five straight before a calf injury that has sidelined him for much of this season. While he possesses unique girth — listed at 230 pounds on a 6-foot-6 frame — he entered the NBA without any of Embiid’s medical red flags, and without the ominous archetypal history of a 7-plus-footer.

On the other hand, one wonders where the Sixers would be if, two or three years ago, they had dropped a similar bombshell on an NBA universe still half-asleep. Trading Embiid at peak MVP form would have required a conviction of steel, not to mention a trading partner who could offer a package that was more than a direct flight back to Process-town.

Unlike Dončić, Embiid brought game-changing defense to go with his primary scoring prowess. The Sixers did not have a co-superstar on the level of Irving who might have helped them execute such a hard and dramatic pivot. In all likelihood, trading Embiid would have left them where they are now, struggling to win games without him, a fringe playoff team at best.

» READ MORE: How much change is needed for a surging Sixers team before the trade deadline? It’s complicated.

The thing about players like Dončić and Embiid — they are of a class where there is no equitable return. You cannot trade them and hope to end up better off than where you were. If Harrison and the Mavericks somehow do it, they will deserve every stride of their victory lap.

As with Embiid pre-2024, you can make a case that justifies Dallas’ desire to trade Dončić. There are legitimate concerns about how his frame will age. He is a liability on defense in a league that increasingly belongs to two-way teams. The Mavericks were largely the same team they were last season, with little room for substantive improvement. Meanwhile, the rest of the Western Conference had gotten appreciably better.

The trade makes some sense when you combine the uncertainty of the Mavericks’ future as a legitimate title contender with the uncertainty about Dončić’s physiology and with the uncertainty of his desire to remain in Dallas. What doesn’t make sense is the return, which would have been the case regardless.

There’s something to be said for getting ahead of an issue. Whether Dallas was justified in doing so remains very much to be seen. I suspect the Mavericks will end up discovering what the Sixers already knew. Often, the most reasonable thing to do is to be happy with what you have and deal with the consequences later.