Mavericks' foolish Luka Doncic admission makes trade look exponentially worse

Despite winning four of their last five games heading into the All-Star break, the Dallas Mavericks have never savored the NBA's annual week-long hiatus from regular season competition more in their entire history than they have this season. Ever since the Mavericks traded Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis late in the evening on February 1, the dynamic of this organization has completely changed and fans still haven't come to terms with it.

The Mavericks have fought valiantly just to stay inside the top eight seeds in the Western Conference recently, as it seemed like their season was about to spiral out of control after Davis and Daniel Gafford suffered tough injuries in back-to-back games. Dallas doesn't project to see any of their rotation-caliber big men back for multiple weeks at the least, including potential-filled sophomore center Dereck Lively II, and Dallas is dealing with all these injuries to their roster in the midst of a PR crisis.

Dallas was down eight players due to injury in their game right before the All-Star break versus the Miami Heat, yet they still managed to win the contest behind a spirited team effort and an efficient 27 points on 11-13 shooting from the field from Dante Exum. The Mavericks may get some help at center in the form of veteran big man Dwight Powell, as Powell is supposedly nearing a return from a hip strain suffered in mid-January, though there isn't anything concrete to report in terms of a timetable for his return.

Powell and 27-year-old two-way contract signee Kylor Kelly are the only bigs Dallas will be able to rely upon for rotation minutes for the foreseeable future, and while Powell's impending return will give Dallas a puncher's chance to come out of this injury-depleted stretch and still be in the playoff race, the Mavericks are in quite the bind with this situation and could've avoided this scenario altogether.

Mavericks and Harrison were never going to offer Doncic the supermax

If Dallas never traded Doncic, the trajectory of their season wouldn't potentially be severely altered even with Gafford getting hurt, as it would be a lot easier for the Mavericks to survive this stretch if their best player was still Doncic instead of Davis since Doncic is obviously currently healthy again. It seems Nico Harrison's narrow-sighted views and discontentment with Doncic simply couldn't have overridden the possibility of this deal going down once he gained trust from Los Angeles Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka though, as Harrison and the Mavericks reportedly didn't plan on offering Doncic the five-year $345 million supermax contract he would've been eligible for this summer even if the Mavericks didn't trade him.

This was reported in an insider piece on Harrison by The Athletic's Fred Katz, Christian Clark, and Mike Vorkunov, and the details of why Dallas didn't want to offer Doncic the supermax confirm Mavericks fans' worst fears.

"The Mavericks were never going to offer Dončić that mega-deal, league sources said. And a general manager identifying one star to trade, negotiating with only one GM he knows and trusts and targeting only one player who he’s worked with before and whose character he can vouch for — just as Harrison did with Dončić, Pelinka and Davis — was no accident."

Katz, Clark, and Vorkunov

Harrison was locked in on Davis in this deal and thinks Davis is a player whose character and habits he wouldn't have to question, which are obviously redeeming qualities Harrison is looking for in a superstar player, and are qualities Harrison didn't think Doncic has given his off-court habits such as drinking beer, smoking hookah, as well as his diet. Those were some of Harrison's concerns listed in this piece by The Athletic, though those factors shouldn't of deterred Harrison from being comfortable with throwing Doncic the supermax this summer, as Doncic is widely considered one of the five best players in the league and is only 25 years old.

The Mavericks and their fans haven't been pedestrian to Doncic's conditioning concerns and recent injury woes that very well could have been prompted by the aforementioned off-court habits of Doncic, but it's not like Doncic was completely crashing out and the Mavericks very well had time to reconcile efforts to get these habits more in check, such as the Denver Nuggets have been able to do with Nikola Jokic in recent seasons.

Unless Doncic's habits were far more troublesome than will ever be reported, Harrison's decision to trade Doncic while not properly gauging his market value and preemptively deciding to not hand him the supermax this summer will never be a completely justifiable decision, especially since Harrison couldn't even wait till the end of this season or give Doncic another chance to compete for a championship in Dallas.