On Saturday night, January 24th, 2026, the Los Angeles Lakers came to town with their new franchise star, Luka Dončić, for his second trip back to Dallas since the trade that shattered everything.
In just
a few days, we’ll mark the one-year anniversary of that midnight surrender — the moment Dončić was sent away for Anthony Davis, Max Christie, a future pick, and the kind of package you might offer for a slightly bruised star, not a generational one. I was at my desk that night. I remember staring blankly at the screen as I typed a column called “The Worst Moment in DFW Sports History Is Here.” I meant every word.
And a year later, nothing — not the ping-pong miracle that delivered Cooper Flagg, not the long-overdue firing of Nico Harrison, not even the surreal image of Dončić returning to the AAC as a Laker while gifting 22 fans a luxury suite experience — comes close to eclipsing the emotional and strategic catastrophe of that trade.
Because the truth is simple and brutal: You never close a championship window voluntarily.
In the coming days, as the trade deadline nears, much of the Mavs discourse will focus on what veterans Dallas might ship off. Klay Thompson. Daniel Gafford. Maybe even P.J. Washington. It’s a familiar cycle by now: tear down, reshuffle, pray for the ping-pong balls to be kind again. But I’d ask Mavericks fans to pause — to feel — before submitting fully to this future-tense loop.
Because the real tragedy of this past year wasn’t just the trade itself. It was how easily so many moved on. How quickly the refrain became “we weren’t going to win anyway,” or “he was leaving eventually,” or worse, “he’s not our guy anymore.”
Luka didn’t just put this team back in the national spotlight. He took a roster stapled together by trade deadline grit and dragged it to the NBA Finals. Three wins away from a parade. And the response from the front office? Not joy. Not commitment. But cold calculus and revisionist logic.
Nico Harrison, shortly after pulling the trigger, told reporters:
“The easiest thing for me is to do nothing. Everyone would praise me for doing nothing. We really believed in it. Time will tell if I’m right.”
Patrick Dumont, echoed that detachment just weeks later:
“We got to the championship games and we didn’t win… so we had to decide: how do we get better?”
As if getting to the championship games…ahem, NBA Finals isn’t what every team in the league is begging the basketball gods for. As if three wins short of the mountaintop is cause to abandon the hike altogether.
Here’s the part that gnaws at me. Most teams never get a Luka. Most teams never get a Dirk. They get glimpses. Moments. And if they’re lucky, a window. The Mavericks had one. Open. Real. Proven. And they chose to board it shut.
I’m not saying another Finals run was guaranteed. Of course it wasn’t. Sports don’t offer that. Life doesn’t offer that. But the point isn’t the parade. It’s the pilgrimage. It’s the chance. You stay in the window until time or nature or the laws of basketball physics close it on you. But you don’t quit on it after one failed attempt. You don’t trade the star who took you there for a player on the back end of his prime and a few half-measures. You don’t make a move Babe Ruth-level in consequence and rationalize it with a shrug.
And if you do?
You don’t get to act surprised when the crowd doesn’t clap.
Saturday night wasn’t just a basketball game. It was a requiem. Luka put up 33 and 11 with a +18 in 39 minutes — in that building, against this team. But the stat sheet wasn’t what made the night surreal. It was the suite full of Mavs fans — invited by Luka himself — who came to thank the player this franchise gave up on. Some of them had defended him through the ugliest moments of last year. And he remembered.
But the reaction online, from the “just move on” crowd, was predictable. Scoffs. Side-eyes. “He’s not your guy anymore.”
Except maybe he is.
Because for some of us, caring about a team means not forgetting. It means mourning what could’ve been. It means feeling both pride and heartbreak when the player you raised becomes something historic — just no longer in your jersey. Being a fan isn’t just about who suits up today. It’s also about honoring the ghost of what was supposed to happen. Dirk did not win it all until he did. We cannot say for certain what would have happened had Doncic been allowed to play out his era, but many of us would rather have continued on those train tracks—wherever they may have led.
Cooper Flagg is the future now. And he deserves our full attention, our full hope. But hope doesn’t require amnesia.
The Dallas Mavericks will rebuild. They’ll market. They’ll sell tickets. They’ll hire a GM outside of the sneaker industry. But they will never undo the moment they chose to walk away from a title window rather than walk through it.
And until the next banner is raised — if it ever is — we will remember. We should remember.
Because sometimes the greatest loyalty is found in the refusal to forget.
