How trading Luka Dončić led to one of the bleakest stretches for any fanbase in modern sports history

By Andy Scholes and Kyle Feldscher, CNN

(CNN) — On February 1, Dallas Mavericks fans woke up wincing from a close loss to the Detroit Pistons the night before. Their team was still in eighth place, fighting to move out of the play-in spots in the NBA’s playoff race, and was three games above .500.

When they woke up the next morning, the sky was falling.

At 12:12 a.m. ET on February 2, ESPN’s Shams Charnia posted on X that Luka Dončić – the Mavericks’ 25-year-old megastar who was expected to be the cornerstone of their franchise for the next decade or more – was being traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. The news stunned a city.

“I woke up at like three in the morning and just saw a notification on my phone and rolled over and looked at it and said, ‘Oh my gosh!’” Dallas fan John Tarrant told CNN Sports. “Of course, that scared my wife … she goes, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘The Mavs traded Luka!’ And I think she rolled over and went back to sleep.”

When he had to share the news with his boys in the morning – their favorite player, whose numbers they wear on their own basketball jerseys and whose pennants adorn their walls – they were in disbelief.

“I just said, ‘You’re joking,’ and went back to sleep,” Hank Tarrant said.

“I was shocked, and I thought that you were joking,” Sam Tarrant added.

Dončić makes his first trip back to Dallas on Wednesday night when the Lakers play the Mavs, a trip that’s sure to be filled with emotion – for Dončić, his teammates and the thousands of fans in the arena who have been angry with Mavericks leadership for trading away a fan favorite superstar.

Rarely has a team’s season hinged on one self-inflicted move. In the more than six weeks since the deal, the Mavericks have gone 12-18, lost Anthony Davis – the main player they received in return for Dončić – for weeks due to injury in his first game with the team, lost talisman Kyrie Irving to a season-ending ACL injury and watched a slew of other players go down hurt. At the same time, they’ve been watching their former star settle in LA alongside LeBron James and the rest of Hollywood’s elite.

It all amounts to potentially the worst in-season stretch for any American sports fanbase in modern history. A bright future suddenly seems dark and uncertain, a franchise icon is now getting used to beaches and palm trees and the best players left on the team are on the sideline instead of the court.

The response from Mavs fans: a mix of despondency and rebellion. Fans are booing their team, chanting for general manager Nico Harrison to be fired and – unbelievably, for some of them – buying Lakers jerseys and starting to follow Dončić’s new team.

“I’m always gonna be a Mavs fan, they’re our local team. But will I be as emotionally invested in them? It’s going to take a lot of rebuilding and rebuilding our trust in the franchise going forward,” John Tarrant told CNN.

Anger at Harrison

The team’s general manager, the man who orchestrated the deal, has taken the brunt of the criticism.

Chants of “Fire Nico!” have broken out all over Dallas – a video on X even showed people chanting it at a local Medieval Times. News that came out of the Mavericks organization after the trade slammed Dončić’s conditioning, with ESPN citing sources inside the franchise revealing frustration with his diet.

The treatment of a player who was widely revered as an icon in Dallas, especially less than a year after an NBA Finals appearance, went over like a ton of bricks.

“Everyone wants to point at Luka’s flaws, at least for a half-second,” Mavs fan Matthew Slovak told CNN. “The overwhelming narrative is that this is the most ridiculous thing ever, but there was that, ‘Yeah, but.’ There is no ‘yeah, but.’ – this is the most indefensible trade of all time.”

In a news conference after the trade, Harrison defended the move as a prudent one that improved the team’s defense and also got ahead of potentially messy contract negotiation.

“There are some unique things about his contract that we had to pay attention to. There are other teams that were loading up … He was going to be able to decide, make his own decision at some point of whether he wants to be here or not, whether we want a supermax him or not, or whether he wants to opt out,” Harrison said. “I think we had to take all that into consideration and feel like we got out in front of what could have been a tumultuous summer.”

It’s safe to say Harrison’s justification for the deal did not convince many – nor did his trade of Quentin Grimes to the Philadelphia 76ers as the guard has caught fire in the City of Brotherly Love.

“You just have no reason to believe in anything that they might throw at us because it just doesn’t make sense,” said Dallas fan Skylar Alcala. “It will never make sense.”

A weight on the team and on the fans

The negative energy around the Mavericks is palpable. Fans are booing, they’re mouthing the words “Fire Nico!’ when they get on the big screen during games and they’re holding protests outside the stadium.

And the players are noticing. Forward PJ Washington responded angrily to a fan who yelled for Harrison to lose his job while the Dallas player was shooting a free throw.

“At the end of the day, the trade happened. We understand we have a new team now. All that ‘Fire Nico’ stuff, we’re sick and tired of hearing it. We just want to go out there and play and the fans to support us,” he said.

Washington’s sentiments are understandable, given that the source of the fans’ ire is the front office rather than the players on the court. But it’s not exactly certain that the Mavs fan base is ready to go quiet now.

And if they do, it may be more due to apathy than to heeding their team’s call for support.

“It will probably take until Luka is out of the NBA completely because the NBA was my favorite sport,” Slovak said of whether he can fully support the team. “And to have that happen to your favorite team, favorite sport – you gotta have those painful memories out of the league before you can start to rebuild.”

As strong as the bond between a team and a fan can be, the bond between a fan and a favorite player can sometimes be even stronger. There are now a not-insignificant number of Mavs fans watching Lakers games on NBA League Pass and paying more attention to how Dončić is doing than they are with their Mavericks, even as they struggle to hold on to a possible play-in spot.

“He was ours,” Tarrant told CNN. “We loved Luka, and I would love to see him win a championship, but I hate that it’s going to be the purple-and-gold when he does that.”

Alcala admitted she’s even crossed a line she never thought she’d face: a new Dončić Lakers jersey arrived in the mail not long ago for her son.

“I can’t believe I bought that,” she said.

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