What if Michael Finley doesn’t grab Luka Dončić’s beer?
When the Dallas Mavericks fired the man who traded Dončić on Tuesday morning, with Nico Harrison finally paying the price for the move that is widely considered one of the worst in league history, my mind almost immediately raced back to that May 30, 2024 night at the Target Center in Minneapolis. And that revealing moment.
If putting up 36 points, 10 rebounds and five assists in a Western Conference finals closeout game wasn’t enough to deserve a celebratory cold one, then Dončić had clearly missed the memo about the return of prohibition. Yet there was Harrison on his right in the hallway near their locker room, hugging his father, Saša, before doing the same with Dončić. If you look at the tape now, knowing all that we know, it almost looks like this was an orchestrated attack.
Harrison distracts from one side, only for his front-office partner to swoop in from the other and snag the suds with all the smoothness of a pick-pocketer. Dončić, clearly confused and likely a bit perturbed, did his best rendition of the Nick Young meme.
“No cameras,” he said to Finley, presumably indicating that he didn’t believe anyone was watching at the time.
I was standing near the interaction when it all went down, and found it curious enough to make note of it in my phone for the sake of future reporting. But the Internet waits for no one these days, and the video that was taken from nearby would go viral not long after. The part the public didn’t see, however, is that Dončić and his father merely retreated through a nearby door and relocated moments later.
In a vacuum, it was a massive overreaction to a situation that Mavericks officials clearly believed was an issue. Little did we know at the time how symbolic those 13 seconds would be.
It was no secret back then that the Mavs were concerned with the way Dončić spent his time off the court, just as they were worried about his weight and the impact it might have on his long-term prospects. But to see them play the role of party crasher with such boldness during his finest professional hour, acting as if they were his bosses more than his partners and causing what appeared to be embarrassment, was to wonder whether these dynamics would pose a bigger problem down the line.
Did they ever.
That’s the sort of energy that would later compel Harrison and Mavericks ownership to justify this nonsensical move, when Harrison and Lakers president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka hatched their secret plan to swap stars and, ultimately, stun the basketball world. Never mind that the Mavericks had just made a Finals run, reaching that stage where they’d only been two other times in the organization’s 45-year history, with Dončić averaging 28.9 points, 9.5 rebounds and 8.1 assists during that postseason. These imperfections in his approach simply couldn’t be tolerated.
Yet while this notion of trading a transcendent star as he approaches his prime wasn’t risky enough, it was the choice to send him to Laker Land that made it so much worse. The Lakers spotlight, perhaps more than any other in the NBA, is so bright and unforgiving that Dončić had to choose whether to shine or be shamed. We know which one he chose by now, how he spent last summer getting skinnier and stronger while training in the kind of way they’d wished he’d done years before.
They should have seen this Laker Land revenge tour coming from half a country away. The irony, of course, is that the same “Mamba mentality” rationale Harrison would employ when explaining this move to others — inspired by his close friendship with the late Kobe Bryant from their decades working together at Nike — would be adopted by Dončić after his departure from Dallas. And all those behind-the-scenes proclamations that Dončić’s body would break down, or that he was too much of a liability to trust with the five-year, $345 million extension he was planning on accepting if it came his way, would age ever so horribly in the seven months that followed.
And it doesn’t stop there. Not even close.
Beyond the optics of Dončić’s glow-up, and how that whole plot twist enraged Mavericks fans while inspiring the “Fire Nico” chants that just wouldn’t stop, it was the other side of this ill-conceived plan that cost Harrison in the end. To decide that 31-year-old, injury-prone Anthony Davis was the competitive and cultural fix to all that “ailed” the Mavs, and to lean so heavily on the Kobe connection that Harrison clearly believed would inspire some sort of modern-day tribute to the late Lakers legend from the remade Mavericks, was nothing short of malpractice. Even the Lakers, who won a title with Davis in 2020 and once envisioned him retiring in their purple and gold jersey, had already determined he wasn’t the sort of ‘alpha’ talent they so desperately needed.
The developments that followed in Dallas, (somewhat) predictable though they might have been, were the kind of things you simply can’t make up. As our Mavericks beat writer, Christian Clark, chronicled here, Davis came into training camp overweight before later suffering a calf strain that caused concern within the organization. Sound familiar? That’s precisely what went down with Dončić in those weeks and months before the trade.
This came, of course, after Davis played just nine games last season because of an adductor strain; he later suffered an eye injury that required surgery in the summer. Kyrie Irving, the nine-time All-Star who was a massive part of Harrison’s plan, went down with an ACL tear in March and is still a ways away from a return.
There is no mistaking where the Basketball Gods stood on this one. Even the luck of the draft draw — Dallas landing top pick Cooper Flagg in June — couldn’t save Harrison. And somewhere in Charlotte, where the Lakers improved to 8-3 the night before and were preparing for a flight to Oklahoma City when the news of the firing broke, it’s safe to assume Dončić didn’t pour one out on his behalf.