In what's always the shortest month of the year, it felt like the longest for Dallas Mavericks fans when it all started the night of February 1, when the world had figured out that Luka Doncic was no longer a member of the Dallas Mavericks and had been traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Since then, the organization has had questions of leadership and transparency, in addition to Mavs fans gathering outside American Airlines Center to protest the trade on numerous occasions.
Since then, the Doncic trade was described by many media outlets as the most shocking in NBA history, comparing it as even more shocking than the Babe Ruth trade to the New York Yankees back in the day. Although there's one detail about the Doncic trade involving Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Anthony Edwards, and it doesn't add up. So much that it's going to cost GM Nico Harrison's credibility even more.
Harrison inquired about Doncic-Edwards swap but got shut down fast
Sam Amick from The Athletic paints a picture that throws all NBA fans out to left field. League sources tell The Athletic that weeks before the Doncic-Anthony Davis trade was finalized, Harrison explored the idea of Edwards being traded for Doncic. Harrison asked the Wolves front office if they'd be interested in trading Edwards, and as we expect, Harrison got a direct "no."
This tells volumes. This means that Harrison was caught in a lie when mentioning only Rob Pelinka and the Lakers as the only team that he talked with about trading Doncic. In the press conference on the day after Doncic was traded, Harrison even said "we had to keep it between us" referencing only Pelinka in keeping what was one of the most revealing secrets in NBA history. In that same press conference, Harrison said straight up that he didn't talk to any other team besides the Lakers.
This is all he said she said at this juncture, so we may never know if talks truly happened with Minnesota, but there have even be rumblings that Dallas called the Milwaukee Bucks about trading Doncic.
This tells us that Harrison was searching harder than we thought to shop Doncic, perhaps because of concerns about his conditioning and his interests in hookah and beer. Despite sitting back and enjoying a nice cold one every once in a while, the Mavs front office seemed to have forgotten that Doncic led the league in scoring, including scorching his original team on draft night putting up 73 points in epic fashion.
This exposes Harrison as covering up more than what he initially said. Whether or not the trade actually works out in Dallas' favor remains to be seen. With the new pieces around Dallas, fans have to admit, it's not hard to get excited about the new squad when healthy. The scary part is that we never know what's being talked about in these front offices, and it's pretty clear that this Mavericks team is all of a sudden a boom or bust championship team.