And We Move On
A trade and a self-created two-plus-decade-long dilemma to follow
I have felt a more thorough, complex sense of disgust over the Luka Doncic/Anthony Davis trade than I figured myself capable of feeling over anything related to the Mavericks at this age. The Mavs hold unique emotional real estate in me. They’ve been my NBA team since youth, since age six or thereabouts. Having grown up in Kansas in the early 2000s, where there is no local NBA team and wasn’t even a regional-enough NBA team to get local games on our cable package as there is now in the Thunder, I first grew connected to basketball through video games, I played Midway’s NBA Showtime, Nintendo and Left Field Productions’ NBA Courtside 2002, and EA Sports’ NBA Live 2003 on a daily basis during the early 2000s. I always picked the Mavs, drawn initially to their silly logo, the letter M wearing a Stetson, the fact that I had a friend who shared a name with them (whom I haven’t seen in years, but I wish him well), and the three-point shooters on those rosters: Finley, Nash, Nowitzki, LaFrentz, Van Exel. That was enough, in childhood, to make me a fan.
It is irrational that they’ve stuck as my NBA team for two-plus decades. I’ve never been to a Mavs game. I was at summer camp during the 2006 and 2011 finals, following them through highlights I caught on days off between sessions. I’ve never owned a jersey (though I can probably count the number of basketball jerseys I’ve owned since childhood on a single hand1 and the number of instances in which I’ve worn basketball jerseys in public on two). I’ve only been to the Metroplex twice and the city of Dallas, though I coincidentally watched a game in American Airlines Arena while there2. KU produced at least one NBA draft pick every year that I was a student, none of whom ended up on the Mavs3.
I have embraced this irrationality. I like that I, and we as humans in general, can get so emotionally invested in sports teams to begin with, irrational as it may be. At least with local outfits, I can connect my support to an extrinsic sense of good, that I like what they provide as a cultural force in the community, but I love the Mavs because of an effectively tactical choice I made while gaming in childhood. I mained Donkey Kong in Super Smash Bros, Lisa in The Simpsons: Road Rage, and the special Marc Ecko team quarterbacked by Xzibit in Madden 2002, but I haven’t stuck with them like I have the Dallas Mavericks. There are times in which I like that I can maintain a connection like this with my childhood self, and there are times in which it’s something I really ought to grow out of. I find myself embodying the latter at the moment.
My appreciation for the team over the years complexified as I did. I find something endearing about the loyalty between Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavs, how entrenched Dirk is in within the team’s story. He redefined the team’s identity during his 21 seasons in Dallas. It’s not that they were without history prior to him — When I was in that arena back in 2014, I looked up to the rafters and saw the two numbers retired: Rolando Blackman and Brad Davis, both of whom helped bring the team within a game of the NBA Finals in 1987 — but they’d lacked one of the great talismanic figures that basketball, with its small rosters, is uniquely capable of producing. When they traded for Dirk in the 1998 draft, the other Texan teams (Houston with Hakeem Olajuwon and San Antonio with David Robinson) had reaped the fruits of their marquee players’ careers in a fashion that Dallas had never found. Dirk’s career presented that to the Mavs. He brought them an MVP, two Western Conference finals wins, and one of the greatest upsets in NBA Finals history. The team celebrated it with a statue and an emblem on the court. I loved this display of mutual loyalty between Dirk and the Mavericks organization.
On a personal level, it is embarrassing to believe that loyalty is a virtue. Caring about loyalty leaves one vulnerable to exploitation and betrayal; it relies on mutual trust and shared values that one can't guarantee from the other party. I can’t cast aspersions on those who think it's for the naive and soon-to-be mistreated, because I've paid the price of one-way loyalty before. I'm also fortunate that I've benefitted from shared loyalty in most of my relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, workplaces, educational institutions, and community institutions akin to what Dirk and the Mavs had.
I grew to appreciate seeing that reflected by my chosen team. I know the common sentiment that fans are supposed to view sports as an escape from their lives, but I view it as an augmentation to mine. I like that I could see a personal value so visibly reflected in a team that I care about. Perhaps it is naive, and of course I know that for every Nowitzki, there is a Nash, but I had felt it up to a few weeks ago. Luka Doncic was supposed to be the next great Maverick, our equivalent to what the Spurs had in Tim Duncan, a franchise-defining player that built upon the legacy of the player before him. For the team to trade him like this, sans pretense, without Luka asking for a trade himself, leaving much of the team and even the coaches in shock, it is completely incongruous with what I liked about this organization. Perhaps this is what happens when I leave myself vulnerable by caring about it like this. Maybe if it was all objective, only about the wins and losses, about chasing rings, about betting point spreads for me, it wouldn't affect me this way, but this is the path that I've chosen.
I have tried to watch both Mavericks and Lakers games in the past week, and I've found myself overcome with a more sincere sense of disgust than I thought I would feel. I've switched away from each game because of it. The entire situation leaves me uncomfortable. I want Luka to succeed in Los Angeles, and I don't harbor ill-will towards Max Christie or Anthony Davis. I want them to succeed, even if I doubt, on a pure basketball level, that their additions will make up for the loss for the Mavericks. The disgust, I've come to realize, lies with the Mavericks organization as a whole. I'm just not compelled to support this team after that trade.
Accepting that as the truth, shamefully melodramatic as it feels to type out, I see three options for the future:
1 - Wait a while and see if the feeling dies down:
Maybe this change is for the best. Maybe, if the team stacks wins from here on out, I'll ignore those principles and choose to enjoy the success.
2 - Change allegiances:
I've been to two Bulls games, I’ve been to a Grizzlies game, I have family roots in Indiana, if I get the subscription for Royals games I'll get Thunder games, the Clippers have re-entrenched themselves in San Diego via their reserve team and have introduced a soccer-style supporter section at their new arena... but I'm almost thirty. Isn’t it a little late to renege on a contract that I signed when I was six? Shouldn't I strive for better than this, anyway? At twenty-nine years and ten months, as I am now, my mother had just given birth to her first child. Meanwhile, I'm single and fretting over which NBA team best reflects my values? Aren't I looking to divorce from the childish qualities to which I've clung over my twenties?
3 - Go dormant with professional basketball as an interest:
I've been looking for an off-ramp from a lot of the personal stakes that I have in sports as it is. It takes up too much of my mental space and I don't feel good about most of the time I spend on them. I've enjoyed following the Mavs, at least, but if I'm not enjoying it anymore, maybe it's just time to move on and replace that time with something else. Maybe years down the line, if I move to a city with an NBA team, I'll pick them up, but I think it's reasonable to recognize when something isn't providing me with the benefits that it once did and move on instead of trying to rekindle a flame in futility for years to come.
This is what I’m leaning towards. I’d rather just move on from this for the time being, and free up time to put towards something else.
A 1996 Sonics Detlef Schrempf, a 1999 New York Liberty Rebecca Lobo, and a 2011 Kansas Tyrel Reed, each either thrifted or bought on clearance at a steep discount
A 2014 Big XII Women’s Basketball Tournament game between the ninth-seeded Kansas Jayhawks and the eighth-seeded Kansas State Wildcats, which I attended with the KU Pep Band
They’ve coincidentally employed a lot of players who knocked KU from the tournament in the early 2010s in recent years - 2013 Michigan’s Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway Jr., 2014 Stanford’s Dwight Powell, 2016 and 18 Villanova’s Jalen Brunson, I suppose now we can include 2012 Kentucky’s Anthony Davis in there