The Athletic has live coverage of Luka Doncic’s return to Dallas as a Laker

When the Dallas Mavericks left for the longest road trip of their season in late January, the team’s franchise player wasn’t with them.

Luka Dončić had suffered a calf strain in a game on Christmas Day and still wasn’t right more than a month later. The sliding Mavericks wanted Dončić to continue his rehabilitation around the team during their five-game, 10-day trip, but Dončić preferred to stay home and work with his medical experts.

Front-office officials tried to communicate with Dončić about a plan to get him back on the court, but discussions between the two sides were spotty. Dončić believed he had suffered the calf strain by trying to come back from a previous injury too soon. His group decided it didn’t make sense for him to be with the team. Not only would plane rides invite a possible setback, but he would also be able to maximize his workouts in Dallas rather than going from city to city during the trip.

The decision frustrated team executives, according to league sources. And it wasn’t the first time the superstar and the organization had clashed.

Such disagreements hadn’t mattered throughout the first five years of Dončić’s career. The superstar had the loyalty of the one person who counted, longtime Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. After engineering a draft-night trade to nab the then-19-year-old Slovenian star in the 2018 NBA Draft, Cuban stuck up for — and stuck with — Dončić at every turn. Cuban understood Dončić could be temperamental, but he trusted in his precocious player and his voluminous talent.

Dončić would be eligible for, and said he was eager to sign, a five-year, $345 million extension this summer. But with Cuban no longer making basketball decisions — he cashed out in December 2023 after selling his majority stake to the Adelson family of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation for $3.5 billion — the Mavericks no longer intended to offer it.

Dallas general manager Nico Harrison had surrounded Dončić with high-level talents such as Kyrie Irving, Dereck Lively II, P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford over two years, culminating in Dallas’ run to the NBA Finals last season. But Harrison had doubts about the wisdom of investing in the 26-year-old Dončić long-term, according to multiple team and league sources, and the decision to skip the trip reiterated what Harrison already believed: The Mavericks would be better off without him.

Dončić returns to Dallas on Wednesday for the first time since the widely criticized Feb. 1 mega-trade that sent him and two other players to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a first-round pick. Over the past several weeks leading up to the game, The Athletic spoke to more than 10 team and league sources who were granted anonymity to be able to freely discuss the deal.

Much of the post-deal criticism has fallen on Harrison, the former Nike executive who worked closely with Kobe Bryant and Lakers GM Rob Pelinka while the latter was Bryant’s player agent. Harrison sees the basketball world through Bryant’s singular “Mamba Mentality” vision, which led him to believe that Dončić — whose off-court habits, including his lack of conditioning, had increasingly bothered Harrison and the Mavericks — would not realize his full potential.

Harrison reported directly to Cuban when he came to the Mavericks in June 2021; the then-owner envisioned bringing in a relationships guy to meld with his years of experience making basketball decisions. Even after Cuban sold his majority stake in the team, the billionaire tech founder painted a picture in which he’d continue to work alongside Harrison to make the franchise’s most important calls.

But after the Dončić trade occurred, it became clear which one of the two had the decision-making juice.

On Feb. 2, Harrison made his only public comments about the Dončić trade, citing “culture” and “defense” as the rationale behind his decision. One week later, Mavericks governor and Sands Corp. chief operating officer Patrick Dumont spoke publicly about the move for the first time, telling The Dallas Morning News, “If you want to take a vacation, don’t do it with us,” in what seemed an obvious reference to Dončić.

Cuban likely would have had a different response to Dončić’s desire to continue his rehab in Dallas. In his 23 years as majority owner, Cuban made many basketball decisions, and the loyalty he showed franchise great Dirk Nowitzki through two decades of ups and downs paid off with a championship in 2011. Cuban expected a similar career arc for Dončić.

In his public comments since the trade, Cuban has made it clear he didn’t support the move. In an interview with a local TV station, he described the trade as a “mistake” and criticized the Mavericks front office for getting only one first-round pick back in the deal. The man who popularized the term “Mavs Fan For Life” has done what he can to distance himself from the most unpopular decision in franchise history.

“From a basketball perspective, I hear about it after the fact,” Cuban told WFAA-TV. “I don’t hear about it beforehand.”

That wasn’t how things were supposed to work. Shortly after the sale in December 2023, Cuban said he expected to remain in a decision-making position with the team.

“Nothing’s really changed except my bank account,” he told reporters. “I feel really good. I think it’s a great partnership. It’s what the team needed on the court and off. I’ll still be overseeing the basketball side of it.”

The Mavericks made the playoffs 18 times with Cuban as majority owner. Building around Nowitzki was a reliable pathway to 50 regular-season wins. But along the way, there were plenty of misses.

In 2004, Cuban allowed Steve Nash to walk in free agency and then watched the Canadian guard win consecutive league MVP awards with the Phoenix Suns. After the Mavs’ upset win over LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the 2011 finals, Cuban let center Tyson Chandler depart via free agency in a sign-and-trade deal with the New York Knicks. In 2013, Cuban disregarded then-GM Donnie Nelson’s desire to draft an obscure Greek prospect named Giannis Antetokounmpo to preserve cap space for a failed free agency run at Dwight Howard.

Post-championship, the Mavericks tried repeatedly to land big fish in free agency. Howard, LeBron James, Deron Williams and Chris Bosh were all players they unsuccessfully pursued.

Harrison’s hiring, built on connections and made in the wake of an acrimonious separation from Nelson, Cuban’s only previous GM, was supposed to change all that. Cuban had been in the loop during Harrison’s February 2023 acquisition of Kyrie Irving from Brooklyn, and Cuban thought that would be the template for future deals: Harrison would lean in on his decades of relationships with the NBA’s elite players to give Dallas a leg up on bringing superstars to Texas, while Cuban employed his deal-making acumen.

From his Nike days, Harrison developed a reputation as someone high-level players knew and trusted. And yet, by late January, trust between the Mavericks and their best player — Dončić — had eroded to the point where they couldn’t agree on whether he should join the team on its extended trip.

When Cuban bought the Mavericks for $285 million in 1999, he felt his technology background gave him an edge. He had sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, and he used that windfall to pump capital into his new team. The Mavericks began traveling on a team-owned Boeing 757, and they stayed exclusively at five-star hotels. They catered meals after every game. The team’s locker room went through a “Pimp My Ride”-style makeover with TVs installed in every player’s locker.

The Mavericks’ luxury tax bill for their 2011 title squad cost nearly $19 million. In 2012, after electing not to re-sign Chandler and other key players from the team, the luxury tax bill was a more modest $2.7 million. That was the ninth straight year Dallas paid luxury taxes. It was also the last time the Mavericks paid the luxury tax while Cuban owned the team.

Cuban has publicly stated that the Mavericks rarely finished in the black in his time as majority owner. Last month, he engaged in a back-and-forth on Facebook with a former Mavericks employee who wrote that Cuban “should be run out of Dallas” after the Dončić deal. Cuban wrote that he undercharged on tickets for years. The Mavericks, he said, were profitable only twice in the 23 years he stewarded the franchise. “Lost hundreds of millions of dollars,” Cuban wrote.

Several former Mavericks employees said that maximizing profits was never Cuban’s primary motivation as the majority owner.

“Mark never raised ticket prices,” one former employee said. “It was always important to Mark that a family of four could come to a Mavericks game and not have to sell a kidney.”

Some team employees felt Cuban needed to take a partner for the Mavericks to maintain their competitive edge. That was where the Adelsons came in. Cuban’s relationship with the family began in 2016, when he gave Sands founder Sheldon Adelson’s then-16-year-old son Matan an internship. One former team employee recalled basketball-crazed Matan riding on the team bus with Mavericks players to Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.

Over the next few years, the Adelsons and Cuban grew closer. Cuban forged a particular bond with Dumont, sensing long-term business opportunities with the son-in-law of Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s widow. The Adelsons had zeroed in on Texas as a place to potentially expand their business empire as they began winding down their investments in Las Vegas. They also wanted to buy an NBA team.

Dumont laid out a vision of building large-scale destination resorts in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, contingent upon getting the Texas state legislature to approve gambling in the state. Cuban thought a resort could also serve as an economic anchor for a new Mavericks arena.

In December 2023, Cuban made the move. The Mavericks’ lease at American Airlines Center would be up in 2031. The Adelsons had real estate expertise and deep pockets. Miriam Adelson’s net worth was $32.3 billion, according to Bloomberg, making her the 52nd richest person on Earth. The $3.5 billion valuation gave Cuban an excellent exit package, and he would still be able to make Mavericks basketball decisions — or so he thought.

“It’s a partnership,” Cuban told reporters at the time of the sale. “They’re not basketball people. I’m not real estate people. That’s why I did it.”

According to team sources, Miriam Adelson has been seen at two Mavericks events this season: a preseason dinner she largely spent engaged in conversation with Irving, and the Christmas Day game against the Minnesota Timberwolves — the last time Dončić wore a Dallas uniform.

Dumont, husband of Miriam’s daughter, Sivan Ochshorn, is the family’s man on the ground. He grew up in Brooklyn and worked in investment banking before beginning his career at Sands Corp. in 2010. He has presented himself as a basketball fanatic, but the reality, according to some who’ve dealt with him in the 16 months he’s run the Mavericks, is that while he may indeed love the sport, he’s a neophyte in the ways of the NBA. (In an interview at a luncheon last offseason, Dumont awkwardly referred to the finals as “the championship games.”)

“Patrick doesn’t know basketball, and he knows he doesn’t,” said one league source.

Patrick Dumont, seen with franchise legend Dirk Nowitzki last May, is the man on the ground for the Adelson family in Dallas. He has made several public comments — including omitting Nowitzki and including Shaquille O’Neal on a list of NBA players renowned for their work ethic — that irked Mavericks fans who have questioned his basketball knowledge. (Sam Hodde / Getty Images)

The Mavericks didn’t trade Dončić because he chose not to accompany them on the trip, but as Dallas set out for five games in 10 days, Harrison chose to continue the secret discussions he’d already begun with Pelinka. After the Mavericks split their first two games of the trip, beating the New Orleans Pelicans on Jan. 29 and falling to the Detroit Pistons two nights later, Harrison recommended pulling the trigger.

Dumont agreed to it. People who have worked with him in his other businesses said he is known to trust those he has empowered. He wants to understand his employees’ thought process before a course of action is taken, but more often than not, he supports his lieutenants’ recommendations if they have more expertise than he does. He trusted Harrison, who believed he had amassed more than enough intelligence over the last couple of years to make his choice.

“I don’t know how many teams saw the same thing that Nico saw,” a league source not involved in the trade discussions said. “And then, the other pieces, the PJ Washingtons, that he put together. And they go to the fricking finals, right? So, I don’t know what you (Dumont) think of your general manager in your few month’s experience with him. But you probably think that he’s got a gift, that he’s good at this.”

Dallas’ 4-1 loss to Boston in the 2024 finals was a key inflection point. Yes, Dončić led the Mavericks in scoring, rebounding and assists, but he also was targeted on defense, and his years-long habit of complaining to referees showed no signs of abating. Dončić fouled out of a must-have Game 3 with 4 minutes, 12 seconds remaining as the Celtics took an insurmountable 3-0 lead.

His body language was so bad during the game that afterward, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst took the unusual tack of ripping Dončić on air for “costing his team because of how he treats the officials.”

The finals reinforced Harrison’s concerns about Dončić’s maturity, and less than eight months later, Dončić was with the Lakers. Mavericks fans have been unceasing in their criticism of both the idea and execution of the trade. However, Harrison has held firm.

Cuban has said both publicly and privately that there was language in the contract selling the team to the Adelson/Dumont family that gave him, if not outright final say on basketball matters, at least a place at the table. He wrote in a social media post that there was language in the sale document giving him authority over basketball operations, but that the “NBA wouldn’t let me put it in the contract.”

When asked to verify this claim, an NBA spokesperson declined to comment.

In his 23-year run, perhaps no NBA owner, except possibly Lakers governor Jeanie Buss, was as singularly identified with their franchise as Cuban was with the Dallas Mavericks.

Before he bought the team, Cuban was a fan who believed the franchise could be remade. The jean-wearing Hoosier transformed the team for the better. Along the way, he incurred millions of dollars in fines for criticizing the officials, suffered the heartbreak of losing an NBA Finals and experienced the ecstasy of finally winning a championship.

But the Dončić trade made clear that his time making decisions was over. Cuban has become just another fan, powerless to stop the Mavericks from trading the most talented player in franchise history.

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images, Stacy Revere, Tim Heitman, Tim Heitman, Tom Pennington / Getty Images)