Nine months ago, the Dallas Mavericks were on top of the world.
They'd punched their ticket to the NBA Finals for the first time in 13 years, having vanquished three 50-plus-win teams in the process. Luka Doncic had just ripped the Minnesota Timberwolves' hearts out in the conference finals - a series in which he averaged an efficient 32-10-8, hit a cold-blooded bomb in Game 2, and sucked the life out of Target Center with a closeout performance for the ages in Game 5. He'd firmly established himself, at the tender age of 25, as one of the great playoff performers of his generation.
At the same time, Kyrie Irving reminded the world he was a perfect second option. All the front office's recent roster moves - from the Irving acquisition to the mini-tank that allowed Dallas to draft center Dereck Lively II to the deadline deals that brought in P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford - had paid off beautifully. The team had mortgaged a huge chunk of its long-term future to build that team around Doncic, surrendering control of all its first-round picks between 2027 and 2030. But that couldn't take the shine off a roster that was set up to contend for the foreseeable future.
The Mavericks' fall from that lofty peak to the pit of despair in which they now reside is one of the most stunning descents in recent NBA history - a nosedive precipitated by both their own decisions and disastrous events outside their control. The latest is Irving's torn ACL, which will sideline him not only for the remainder of this season but for much of next season as well. With that, Dallas' already flickering hopes of competing for anything meaningful in the next two years were effectively extinguished.
This season started out well enough for the Mavs. After a humbling loss to the Boston Celtics in the Finals, they'd had a solid summer in which they added Klay Thompson, Quentin Grimes, and Naji Marshall, positioning themselves to make another deep run. Heading into their Christmas Day showdown against the Timberwolves, they were 19-10, just a game out of second place in the West, with top-10 rankings on both sides of the ball. And then everything started to go sideways.
Doncic strained his calf in that Christmas game, which turned out to be his last appearance as a Maverick. In the six weeks between then and the galaxy-brained trade that gifted Doncic to the Lakers, the Mavs also lost Lively to a severe ankle injury. The sophomore was balling out before hitting the shelf: In his last game before the injury, he racked up a career-high eight assists. The game before that, he'd put up a season-high 21 points and tied a career high with 16 rebounds. Dallas performed 9.5 points per 100 possessions better with Lively on the floor than on the bench. He's still yet to return.
In leaks to the media following the wildly unpopular Doncic move, Mavs general manager Nico Harrison indicated that he and other members of the organization had concerns about Doncic's durability. Why those same decision-makers saw fit to trade him for Anthony Davis - an undeniably brilliant but objectively worse player who's six years older and has a much spottier injury history - was left to the imagination. In any case, Davis was tremendous for three quarters in his Mavericks debut ... before leaving the game with a groin injury. Four weeks later, he too remains on the shelf without a timetable for his return.
One game after Davis' injury, it was Gafford's turn. He suffered an MCL sprain that very likely ended his season and left Dallas with zero ambulant big men. Irving did an admirable job keeping the Mavs afloat, helping them scrape out a few wins with the likes of Moses Brown and Kessler Edwards starting at center.
Those wins kept Dallas in the play-in mix and within spitting distance of a top-six seed. On top of Irving's excellence, Washington was playing some of the best ball of his career. Dante Exum returned from a season-long injury absence and looked no worse for wear. Max Christie, the young wing who arrived with Davis in the Doncic deal, was surging at both ends of the floor, making up for the fact that the Mavs also traded Grimes for Caleb Martin for no good reason. (Martin has been sidelined with a hip injury for two months and has yet to suit up for Dallas.) In other words, there were enough encouraging signs to convince you that if Davis and Lively could make it back, this team might still be heard from in the spring.
So much for that.
Whatever qualms you may have had with Harrison's cockamamie "defense wins championships" rationale, there was no doubt that Davis and Lively would make for a suffocating frontcourt pairing and the team's size would pose all kinds of problems for opponents with Washington sliding down to the three. Irving, while better suited as a second option, is a gifted enough creator to keep a team's offense at least respectable as its lead guard. A healthy Mavs team would've been fun to watch during the stretch run.
That's the most galling part about this whole saga (well, other than the part where a franchise traded a 25-year-old megastar who made five All-NBA first teams in his first six seasons and just led the club to the freaking Finals): The roster left standing was still very good, but we never got to see it.
Dallas is now bereft of bigs and guards. (Jaden Hardy sprained his ankle in the same game as Irving.) At 32-30, in 10th place in the West, this team will either be one-and-done in the play-in or scrabbling for double-digit lottery seeding. Next season's outlook doesn't figure to be much rosier. By the time Irving is fully healthy and back up to speed, he'll be a 34-year-old pending free agent. Davis will be an injury-prone 33-year-old big man with two years and $120 million left on his contract. And the Mavs will be staring at a draft-pick desert spanning about half a decade. But hey, at least they won't have to pay Doncic's supermax!
How did things come to this? Surely even the most dispirited, pessimistic Dallas fan following the Doncic trade couldn't have imagined it blowing up in the team's face so quickly and spectacularly. It's amazing how every aspect of the organization's plan backfired. Doncic not durable? Well, he'll probably play more games for the Lakers this season than Dallas gets post-trade from Irving, Davis, Lively, and Gafford combined. Defense wins championships? Would you look at that - the Lakers have the best defensive rating in the league since the trade. Heck, Grimes just dropped 44 points for the Sixers! It's enough to make you believe in the wrath of the basketball gods.
Even if you don't buy into that kind of karmic retribution, how can you not feel the weight of the psychic baggage on this franchise's back right now? How are the Mavs and their fans supposed to recover and move forward? It's barely been a month since the trade, so they're still about nine torturous decades shy of rivaling the sports world's greatest hex. But considering the way things have spiraled in the immediate aftermath, it's hard not to wonder if we're witnessing the dawn of basketball's version of the Curse of the Bambino.
Let's revisit this in the year 2109.
Joe Wolfond covers the NBA for theScore.
