Unbelievable irony of Mavericks’ Doncic trade makes Nico Harrison look even worse

As we approach the NBA All-Star break, the Dallas Mavericks only have two games remaining until the league’s annual weekend festivities, with one of those games coming tonight versus the Golden State Warriors. Compared to All-Star breaks from recent seasons though, this is easily the most unsure Mavericks fans have felt about their squad as we approach the back half of the season, as Dallas only has a half-game lead for the eighth seed in the Western Conference.

Dallas fell to 28-26 after their Monday night overtime loss to the Sacramento Kings, and it was a double whammy for Mavericks fans, as DeMar DeRozan sank a game-winning floater against Dallas on the same night that Luka Doncic made his Los Angeles Lakers debut.

The Mavericks fought valiantly despite coming up short against the Kings, as Dallas lost their only rotation big man left on the roster with Daniel Gafford suffering a right knee sprain in the second quarter of the game. Gafford won’t even be re-evaluated for another two weeks, and Dallas’ depth at their center position has been completely ransacked after Anthony Davis suffered a left adductor strain in his debut last Saturday against the Houston Rockets.

With not one of Dereck Lively II, Gafford, or Davis looking like they will be back before the end of February, Dallas could struggle to stay afloat in the play-in race, and they could very well fall completely out of it if their wings aren’t ready to compensate a far more egregious rim protecting and rebounding role than they are accustomed to.

Anthony Davis' injury history is much worse than Luka Doncic's

Dallas’ only big man now is newly acquired two-way contract signee Kylor Kelley, and while Kelley has decent verticality in the lob game and can move his feet well in space defensively for a center, he hasn’t displayed the physicality or rim protection needed to be a rotation-caliber big in the NBA so far. The worst part is that the Mavericks could’ve avoided this situation entirely by not trading Doncic, as Doncic and Irving alone would at least help the Mavericks stay relatively afloat till they got their bigs back if Dallas never made the Doncic trade.

Instead, Mavericks President of Basketball Operations Nico Harrison made one of the most contradictory and ironic trades of all time. One of the main reasons Harrison and the Mavericks organization cited trading Doncic was because they didn’t think he would ever take his conditioning seriously, and they assumed this would lead to Doncic not being able to stay healthy throughout the duration of his career.

However, the player Harrison traded for in Davis has a much worse track record in terms of injury history, as Davis has only played five seasons of 65 games or more, which is the new minimum requirement to be considered for any All-NBA awards. Davis battled through a variety of different injuries in his first four seasons with the New Orleans Pelicans before finally playing 75 games for two seasons in a row throughout the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons respectively. After a healthy season in his first season with the Lakers and winning the 2020 NBA Championship, Davis missed roughly 48 percent of potential games over the next three seasons with calf, adductor, Achilles, knee, wrist, back, and foot injuries.

This three-season stretch with the Lakers solidified Davis as one of the more injury-prone superstars in the league, though he had been playing about a season and a half of the most healthy basketball that he’s played since the bubble season before suffering a core injury right before being traded to Dallas. 

Davis has already suffered an adductor injury before, and it’s likely that the abdominal strain that caused him to miss his first two games in Dallas was interrelated to this issue, so Harrison’s experiment is going worse than could even be expected up to this point.

It’s extremely unfortunate that Davis has been subject to such harsh criticism from some fans after stringing together such a long run of healthy basketball, but Harrison did trade for an injury-prone 31-year-old superstar instead of keeping his 25-year-old superstar who had mild longevity concerns at most up to this point in his career, and Mavericks fans worst fears with this move came true faster than they could even blink. Davis was even injured at the time of the trade, and it's not like Mavs fans didn't see this coming.

Karma is laughing at Harrison and the Mavericks in the face, and all Dallas fans can do now is hope their depleted roster led by Kyrie Irving somehow shows enough grit and toughness to get through the next few weeks of the season and still remain in the playoff race.

There’s a slim chance Dallas could get healthy before the NBA Playoffs and really turn this ship around, but it’s clear Harrison’s reasoning for making the Doncic is trade is contradicted by Davis’ recent injury, whether that is fair to the newly acquired big man or not.