sp6r=underrated wrote:https://www.starsthoughts.com/p/im-no-basketball-expert-but-the-luka?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I really like this piece by the Dallas Stars, hockey team, beat reporter. He admits he's not much of a hoops fan but talks about the trade strictly in terms of how it impacts a fanbase.
Those statues aren’t there because of cumulative statistics, or because one GM outsmarted another, or even because of a championship in 2011 or 1999. Those statues are there because people feel things about those two players. Dirk and Mo grew into more than any single player can be in any given game, and even a basketball idiot like me knows about Dirk’s shot, and how beloved he is, and how much it meant for him to get his championship in Dallas, and to retire here.
Here’s the secret: Sports aren’t really about winning games, but winning hearts.
...
This trade, even if you think it makes the Mavericks more likely to win a championship—as their GM purportedly does, though most basketball folks I’ve heard from are far from convinced of that—it also makes this team far less likely to live beyond a given season. A decision like this one shocks everybody because of how obviously damaging it is, how angry it will make people for years, and maybe forever.
There’s a reason most people can’t tell you whom Babe Ruth or Wayne Gretzky were traded for.
Like everyone I this trade is trash strictly on the basketball but on some level the baffling thing about this trade for me is the risk they took with their fanbase
Basketball fans more than other team sport identify with players. The national bulls fanbase collapsed when Jordan left. Lebron fans have followed him team to team. You can make a great case this Cavs team is playing at the level of an ATG team but it isn't generating anywhere near the excitement of Lebron era Cavs because there isn't a Lebron on it.
Luka isn't Lebron but he is the type of player fans identify with. I'm amazed they'd risk the fanbase for a trade where there was no rush and in which the trade didn't generate the possibility of enormous improvement.
I think this is a facet of the story that we may soon learn that new ownership really didn't understand the scale of, and if they had, they wouldn't have done the trade.
With that said, it's also possible they saw how much the Dallas Maverick fanbase was essentially transforming into a Luka fanbase, and that might have been something they felt a need to stop before it went any further.
One of the positions I've heard mentioned since the trade happened is that the Mavs pushed Luka to be the absolute basketball angel of their franchise and then broke up with him in a way that made them look like they were abusing that angel. There's real truth to the statement, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
From a House of Cards type perspective, the thing to do is leak stuff out there making people sour on their opinion of the guy so that when the team moves on from him, people are less attached to him, and so one can ask "Why didn't they do that?"...
except, they kinda did. Literally the entire basketball world already knew that Luka was a diva with all sorts of toxic habits both for his body and for the environment around hm...but it didn't matter. The reality was that anyone sold on Luka not only didn't care about that toxicity, but quite likely found it endearing. Because at this point we're just so used to stan culture and broader demagoguery that people aren't looking to achieve more nuanced perspectives on things they are fanatical about.
This then to say, there probably wasn't anything more worthwhile the Mavs could do to sway the fanbase to side with them away from Luka, and so if a divorce is what they wanted, might as well rip off the band aid. And of course, doing all of this in secret would go with said rip.
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Let me finish this post with a separate thought:
I think we have to try to understand what happened here from a perspective that the people who first acquired Luka are now gone. We would expect that from a career narrative perspective, it would probably never make sense for Donnie Nelson or Mark Cuban to trade Luka away. He was a feather in their respective caps.
But that GM got pushed out, and replaced by someone whose main claim to success prior to this point is acquiring Kyrie Irving. Even if he successfully builds around Luka perfectly in Dallas, people are always going to give much of the credit to those involved in acquiring Luka. Not saying that Harrison did this pre-meditatively for his own narrative - though such GMs do exist - but clearly, we can now see he was never tied to Luka like fans would have assumed he was.
And then that owner sold, and while we fans would probably expect that the new owner would think he was acquiring "Luka's team", but clearly it wasn't. For the Adelson family this acquisition was a small fraction of their overall fortune, and was more about a presence in the state of Texas than it was about fandom.
