The Dallas Mavericks just traded Luka Doncic, probably the third-best player in the NBA, to the Los Angeles Lakers. In return, they received a package built around Anthony Davis and a single first-round pick. It’s hard not to feel there are multiple teams around the league that could have put together a better offer. So what would the Houston Rockets offer for Doncic have entailed?
What the Rockets Would Have Offered for Luka Doncic
First of all, how about anything the Mavericks wanted? That’s pretty much what the Rockets’ would have been willing to give for a player of Doncic’s talent. The only slight hangup with that approach would have been that, apparently, the Mavericks wanted Davis (with complementary Max Christie) and no one else. Seriously, no one else, not even Austin Reaves.
The Rockets could have built a package combining components of its emerging big three, additional young prospects, and an enormous bundle of picks. Amen Thompson looks like the second-best player from a loaded 2023 draft. Jalen Green remains an enticing, yet streaky, young prospect with enormous potential (though his poison pill contract complicates his trade status). Alperen Sengun just made his first All-Star team. Tari Eason and Jabari Smith Jr. are good young players. Cam Whitmore and Reed Sheppard have plenty of upside.
The Rockets have their own picks, Suns picks, and even potentially Dallas’ 2029 first. Besides the Oklahoma City Thunder, there isn’t a team in the league that could assemble as competitive a package of picks and young prospects. The Rockets have so many talented young players they could have swapped out three for Doncic and still had young costars to surround him with.
Why A Rockets Offer for Doncic Might Have Underwhelmed
But they don’t have a player like Davis (though Thompson does look destined to wind up in a lot of “how does that guy not have a DPOY by now” discussions based on sharing his draft with Victor Wembanyama). It has to be said, that the Mavericks do remain a very competitive-looking team. They’re better right now with Davis than any deal with the Rockets could have made them.
But losing a generational superstar creator makes Dallas’ ceiling look lower than it did before the deal. And they’ve wound up with overall lower-value trade assets as well. So it’s a little hard to follow why they made the trade at all.
The understanding of the trade that NBA fandom has to default to for the moment is that the Mavericks front office just really, really likes Davis. It’s not completely insane to believe that Davis can contribute to a winning style of basketball more effectively than Doncic. It looks a little insane, since Doncic just took his team to the finals as the number one option, while Davis won five years ago as the number two behind a player with Doncic’s same offensive archetype in LeBron James.
But as much as Doncic may resemble LeBron on offense, and may have even surpassed him, he’s never been anything close to him on defense. Well, these days, they might be sort of close, which will pose certain problems for the Lakers over the remainder of the season. But LeBron is 40 years old. Back in 2020, he was still a key part of an impenetrable championship defense. In his Miami and Cleveland days, LeBron was an elite defender.
Dallas’ Future This Year And Beyond
Dallas will be a defensive powerhouse if Davis can stay healthy. If Kyrie Irving can stay healthy (and out of trouble), then they will retain a scoring punch that has allowed them to remain competitive during Doncic’s absence. The 25-year-old Doncic made them look like possible contenders for years to come. The 31-year-old Davis doesn’t do that so well, especially paired with the 32-year-old Irving. At least for this year though, an evaluation comes down to comparing the value of game-warping shot-creation to game-warping defense. A Rockets deal would have been the beginning of a soft rebuild.
The Bit of the Trade That Can’t Be Explained
But even if the Mavericks really love Davis and are all in on their specific vision of a championship-level team, the trade still doesn’t make any sense for one specific reason. Why not test the market? Even if Dallas ultimately wasn’t interested in whatever offers could be put together by teams like the Rockets, surely they could have used the pretense of a bidding war to improve LA’s offer.
Followers of the NBA are left with the unpleasant, seedy feeling that something will emerge in the coming days, which paints the trade in an entirely different light. There are only two reasons to accept the Lakers’ offer out of the blue the way they did that gain any traction in the mind. One is self-sabotage, with the convoluted theory being that the new Dallas ownership is interested in relocating the team to Las Vegas. Though, without much insight into how the specifics of such a process would work, this explanation relies primarily on the convenience factor of how much the deal looks like self-sabotage. Additionally, it looks like a Las Vegas expansion team is on the horizon.
The other more likely scenario is that the Mavericks have access to information which, should it emerge, would lower Doncic’s trade value considerably. Information that teams besides the Lakers may have been more inclined to snoop around to find out. The Lakers want stars. Now they have one ready in place for their post-LeBron future. They may figure that, if a storm around this particular star is coming, there is no better organization to weather it.
The Last Word
A player like Doncic was exactly what this Rockets team was missing. But, of course, 29 teams in the league were missing a player like Doncic. The Rockets used to have prime James Harden. The team closest to having one before the trade was probably the Lakers in post-prime LeBron. Now they’re the team that has Doncic himself as well. The Rockets, meanwhile, can stick to their stated aim of seeing the season through without making any major offers, for Doncic or otherwise. They’ll have plenty of powder ready for possible star acquisitions this summer. There’ll just be one less star who might be available to acquire.
Photo credit: © Troy Taormina-Imagn Images
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