Subscribe
Follow Us
When Shams Charania announced that the Dallas Mavericks were trading Luka Doncic, Markieff Morris, and Maxi Kleber to Los Angeles for a package headlined by Anthony Davis, fans outwardly wondered if the ESPN Insider had been hacked.
The deal came out of the blue, involved two All-Star players, and just seemed unimaginable in the middle of the season for more reasons than one. And in 2025, when something strange happens that falls just slightly out of the realm of expectations, conspiracy theories start to run rampant.
Some fans assumed that the Mavericks had to be trading Doncic to save money. Others thought it could be a ploy to move the franchise to Las Vegas. And others still thought the threat of Las Vegas could force Governor Greg Abbott to legalize sports gambling and, in turn, allow the organization to build a sports complex paired up with a casino and sportsbook.
Intriguing? For the conspiracy-minded, you bet, but according to Adam Silver in a press conference covered by ESPN's Tim Bontemps, this trade was about one thing and one thing only: moving a player for a different one, with the Mavericks, in turn, staying put in Dallas for the foreseeable future.
“Adam Silver says there is ‘no doubt' in his mind that owners of the Mavericks bought the team to have it in Dallas and that there were no ‘ulterior motives' to the Luka Doncic trade, which he said he was as surprised as everyone else by when it happened,” Bomtemps wrote.
Silver took things a step further elsewhere in his presser, letting it be known that he didn't even know about the trade until it had already happened, as he and the rest of the league office watched along just like fans as everything went down.
“I was surprised when I heard the trade. I did not know that Luka Doncic was potentially a player that was about to be traded; that was news to me,” Silver told reporters. “I followed it like a fan from that standpoint. And I said before, that's the kind of confidential information that's generally not shared with the league in advance unless a team is publically shopping a player, and to my knowledge, that's not what happened in this case.”
Could this move have been such a massive conspiracy if the NBA didn't even know about it? Would Silver have gone on the record saying he didn't know what was happening if he did in order to avoid even more anger in Dallas? Needless to say, while these answers likely won't stop some fans from hypothesizing that professional basketball could be leaving Dallas and heading to Las Vegas, most fans should be able to confidently say that Nico Harrison made this deal because he thought it made the Mavericks better, even if most fans would disagree.
