Doncic for Davis

One of the biggest and most surprising trades in NBA history occurred this weekend.

There haven’t been a ton of “I remember where I was” moments in my life when it came to NBA personnel transactions.

The Paul George-to-the-Clippers deal in the summer of 2019 was one, mainly because I was in Las Vegas for Summer League and remembered seeing the news filter and flow through people standing in the lobby of the Mirage hotel that night (it was also the night that an earthquake located in Los Angeles was felt in Vegas, which is another story unto itself). Obviously, the news about KD both coming to the Warriors and then going to Brooklyn are entrenched in my mind, but the specificity of those moments was due to the fact I was profoundly invested.

But we had one of those moments this weekend when, at around midnight on the east coast on the night of February 1st, it was announced that the Dallas Mavericks would be trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis. Those are the main moving pieces, though here’s the specifics of the trade as tweeted out by ESPN’s Shams Charania:

As I rolled over and checked my phone as I’d waken up in the night, I was shocked to see the news as an ESPN notification on my screen. Was I dreaming? While I was able to sleep, if I woke up again during the night I’d find myself thinking about how crazy this all was. That this news came in the middle of the night for us east coast folks made it feel all the more surreal.

On one hand, it’s not really all that surprising. The Lakers have been doing this/pulling off these kinds of moves for just about as long as they’ve been in Los Angeles (Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, Pau Gasol, Anthony Davis). The Gasol and Davis trades in particular, which allowed the Lakers to get the perfect second star (to compliment Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, respectively), really cemented this feeling that the Lakers could, one way or another, get that star player (and seemingly not giving up as much as they should have, especially that Gasol trade). There is some precedent for this, which is also something so frustrating to those of us who do not really like the Lakers.

But this is different. This is the Lakers acquiring arguably one of the top 5 players in the league right now. The Lakers acquired a young player in his prime. Doncic finished third in MVP voting last season while leading a team into the NBA Finals. While injuries have slowed down Doncic in the 2024-25 season, that was seeming more like the exception than the rule. Doncic had the Mavericks in the playoffs four of his seven seasons in the league including that 2024 NBA Finals appearance as well as a trip to the 2022 Western Conference finals. Bill Simmons’ 2025 trade value column has Luka in the #4 spot (meaning there were only three other players less likely to be traded than him). This is closer to when the Lakers signed Shaq as a free agent than the trades for Davis and Gasol in terms of the talent they were bringing in.

But there are questions about Luka—his defense (which is suspect), his conditioning/weight, whether or not he would be worth the supermax extension he would be due for at the end of this contract (which… that seems kind of ridiculous) and other issues with personality/temperament. But even with those issues and questions, he was still a player you’d expect a team to stick with and see if he developed and grew over a few more seasons. Plenty have speculated, and one wonders, if there was more friction between team and player that led to this shocking move, but even if you were someone who had doubts/questions about Doncic (as I did) you did not expect anything to happen so soon.

Part of what makes this move so strange and interesting is the return the Mavericks got. Moving on from a major player, one would’ve expected the Mavericks to be in the market for a ton of draft capital (look at what the Kings got in return for De’Aaron Fox, for example). Instead, the centerpiece of the return was another player in Anthony Davis (who’s six years older than Doncic). Davis’ career filled with time missed due to injury and issues with health, thus the notion that Doncic’ health was the motivating factor in this trade seems dubious.

Just like I’m of two minds about Doncic, I’m similarly torn in my assessment of Davis. Maybe after watching Draymond Green so frequently neutralize him, I’ve always thought Davis is a bit overrated as a player. But he’s been the Lakers’ best player this season (his defense and rim protection in particular). Obviously, I end up a little more fixated on the games against the Warriors as that’s what I’m paying the most attention to, but it’s Davis who made the difference in Los Angeles’ January 25th win over Golden State.

While LeBron James is still a great player who is an important part of everything the Lakers are doing, when I think about what puts them a cut above it is (or was) Davis. Pairing that with Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson, and the Mavericks supporting cast… I don’t hate it and maybe even like that you don’t have a player who so clearly overlaps with Kyrie in terms of what they do on the court.

But then you have Davis’ injury history and the fact that, while he’s a difference maker and talented player, he doesn’t have that top-level skill that Doncic possesses. I don’t know if it makes the Lakers a decidedly better team right now, but it really might be about positioning themselves for the future when they move on from LeBron and build a team totally around Luka. By contrast, I could see the Davis-Irving combination working well in Dallas if Davis is able to remain healthy. But the potential for that to work seems to only be in the short term and what they gave up set them back in the long term (and maybe even the short term). But it’s one of the biggest and almost certainly the most shocking trades in recent NBA history, and we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out for all parties involved.