Each week during the 2025-26 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.
Last week: The Chicago Bulls are for real
Fact or Fiction: We can still be mad about the Luka trade
Lost in the mess of the Dallas Mavericks’ firing of general manager Nico Harrison, nine months after he traded Luka Dončić, is the fact the Los Angeles Lakers lucked into another generational superstar.
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Seriously. The guy who made the deal, who reportedly never opened the bidding to the entire league, was universally mocked the moment he made it, and it got so bad, so fast they fired him inside of a year.
It was basketball malpractice. Harrison’s firing is meant to provide closure. But has it?
The Lakers are 8-4, firmly in position for a guaranteed playoff seed in the Western Conference, and LeBron James has not even taken the floor for them this season. Because Dončić has been incredible.
Dončić leads the league in points per game (34.9) and usage percentage (38.3), and he has yet to dial in his efficiency (48/31/78 shooting splits). He is as advertised in Men’s Health — slimmer, well-conditioned, a warrior. On the Lakers. He is their orbit, save for when Austin Reaves is going. Even on a misfit roster, without his co-star, Dončić is steering an offense that has performed at a top-five level when he is on the court.
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He has made Rob Pelinka look like a genius. Which, before that trade, was not so easy. Just ask James, who passive-aggressively questioned the Lakers’ offseason when they did not grant him an extension.
Pelinka inherited James from Magic Johnson’s stewardship of the Lakers. He traded for Anthony Davis and constructed the core of the roster that helped James to a championship in 2020. The Lakers, though, have won a playoff series in a single season since, losing in the first round each of the past two seasons.
Remember, Pelinka pulled the trigger on a 2021 trade for Russell Westbrook that would have gone down as one of the worst deals of this century, if Harrison had not bailed him out of it. The Lakers were stuck. They had a 40-year-old James, clearly in decline. They had an oft-injured Davis, who, as he aged into his mid-30s, was not getting any more attractive as an asset and is due for a massive contract extension.
The Lakers would have had an impossible time building another contender around those two. They had hit their ceiling in the first round of the playoffs. They would have ridden the final few years of James’ career to the same end as Kobe Bryant’s farewell tour — into the lottery, where they have repeatedly whiffed since Jerry West landed Bryant in a draft-day deal for Vlade Divac, another highway robbery.
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Do not even get me started on the Pau Gasol trade of 2008, when the Memphis Grizzlies also gifted him to the Lakers without ever opening the bidding to the entire NBA. The Dončić deal is that times a million.
Not even Reaves, whose rise as an undrafted player they also somewhat lucked into (nobody saw this coming from Reaves), could have saved what James and Davis had left. They required a play-in tournament victory just to make the 2023 playoffs. Imagine what they would have looked like this season, as both James and Davis battle persistent injuries. They would have been this year’s 14th-place Mavericks, only without Cooper Flagg, since the Lakers did not own a pick in this past June’s draft.
The Lakers did have first-round picks in 2029 and 2031 to trade, along with a few swaps, and Reaves. That package last season might have gotten the Lakers in the conversation for Trae Young, whose arrival in L.A. would have set the Lakers ceiling at sub-championship level for as long as he was on the roster. They were getting desperate to build around a late-career LeBron, and they would have dealt it all for any star.
Instead, the Lakers used a fraction of that cost — Davis, Max Christie and their 2029 pick — to snag Dončić, one of the few players in the league who can singlehandedly change the fortunes of a franchise. That is right: The Lakers kept a first-round pick, several swaps and Reaves when Dallas could have gotten all of it in the deal. Honestly, you think the Lakers wouldn’t have given it all up for the chance at Dončić?
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Not even Dončić could believe he was moved, and for so little.
As he reminded reporters this week, “I thought I was going to stay there forever, but I didn’t.”
Everyone in the league would have moved heaven and earth to secure Dončić, and that is the point. Harrison never gave them the opportunity. He reportedly concocted the idea with a good friend, Pelinka, and saw it through to its end without giving any other executive the chance to beat the Lakers’ offer.
It was the worst deal in NBA history, and of course it benefited the Lakers. There is no recourse for other teams. It is not like they can say, “It’s weird that two friends, who reportedly had ‘joint family vacations,’ altered the fabric of the NBA in a backroom deal; that probably shouldn’t happen.” But they can think it.
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They can still be mad about it.
“Time will tell if I’m right,” Harrison said at the time of the transaction. It took no time. The “Fire Nico” chants rang from the Dallas rafters as soon as the trade was made, and fans were right. He was wrong.
And now Harrison is out of the league, while everyone else is still reeling from the deal.
As Doc Rivers, whose Milwaukee Bucks set the Mavericks back to 3-8 on the season, told reporters in Dallas earlier this week, “The whole Luka thing just doesn’t go away — and it won’t. That’s a rough one.”
Dončić is in Los Angeles, where the Lakers luck into a generational superstar every so often. Or they make their own luck, because they are in L.A. Players want to be there. It does not mean you have to make it easy for them.
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Dončić is almost too good, even for Pelinka to screw it up for Los Angeles. He led the Mavericks to the 2022 Western Conference finals and 2024 NBA Finals with Harrison at the helm. Who is to say he will not do the same for the Lakers, especially whenever they luck into yet another star to go along with Dončić?
Welcome to the NBA, where Lakers exceptionalism is still very much alive.
Thanks again, Nico.
Determination: Fact. Everyone but the Lakers should still be furious about the Luka Dončić trade.
