On February 2nd of this year, in the dead of night, or under cover of darkness, perhaps the strangest, or as the sports commentators put it, most “puzzling” trade in the history of the National Basketball Association occurred. Luka Dončić, one of the two or three best players in the league, who had led the Mavericks to the NBA finals last season, was traded to their rival in the Western Conference, the Los Angeles Lakers, essentially for Anthony Davis, who is perhaps the tenth-best player in the league.
Dončić at the time was 25, Davis 31; that is, Dončić, has at least six more productive years at his peak than Davis, who is probably starting a slow decline. In addition, Davis is known around the league as “Mr. Glass,” because he is so fragile and can so easily be broken. Indeed, in his first game for the Mavericks he sustained an injury which has taken him off the court for a month. The Mavericks are tanking thanks also to the loss of their now best player Kyrie Irving, the only player in the NBA this season to be sporting the NBA shooting crown of 50-40-90, 50 percent from the field, 40 percent on coveted three-point shots, and 90 percent from the free throw line. It is said that part of the reason for Kyrie’s season-ending injury is his being overworked after the trade. Dončić, meanwhile, who has been injured for part of the season, has returned and over the last few games is averaging 31 points and keeping the Lakers, without for the moment their star LeBron James, afloat.
The trade is being blamed on general manager Nico Harrison, but that makes little sense. Harrison, who reached out to the Lakers and initiated the trade, is a savvy general manager whose two acquisitions last season at the trade deadline helped propel the Mavericks to the finals. Yes, they needed more defense to win the championship (Davis is one of the best defensive players in the league, Dončić, one of the worst) but that could have been accomplished with Harrison making the kind of moves he made last year and without trading away the franchise player and without receiving comparable worth.
The team, upon hearing about the trade, is in the words of Kyrie Irving “grieving,” and the fans have been staging protests outside and inside the arena. The national sports reporters have thrown up their hands and claim not to be able to understand the trade, with ESPN sports network dean Steven A. Smith, who beyond the bombast is actually quite perceptive, claiming that the real beneficiaries of the trade were “the reporters” who can now have as much fun kicking around another Dallas franchise as they have mocking the football Dallas Cowboys. The problem here lies not with the general manager but with the ownership, and that is a place network sports reporting, except to make fun of bumbling hires, dare not and does not go.
As Dave Zirin put it in The Nation, “the trade felt like it came out of spite.”
So why was it made and who engineered this trade?
The team was bought in late 2023 by Miriam Adelson, whose son-in-law Patrick Dumont oversees the Mavericks and refers to himself as “the governor” of the franchise.
Adelson, whose fortune along with that of her now deceased husband Sheldon, is anchored by gambling halls in Vegas and now expanding overseas as well, had in 2024 an estimated net worth of $32 billion, making her the richest Israeli and eighth-richest woman in the world. She is an avowed Zionist and a huge supporter of both Israel and Donald Trump, donating $100 million to his campaign and his inauguration, where she sat in the front row, ahead of the legislators, and with a trio of like-minded oligarchs: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Trump awarded her the Congressional Medal of Freedom in 2018. Makes you think of Congressional Medal of Honor winner John Kennedy, with Adelson’s request and admonition being rather, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what your country can do for Israel.”
When irate fans appeared at the Dallas Arena with T-shirts with Adelson in a clown nose or mouthing a criticism when they showed up on the jumbotron during a kiss-cam, they were seized by security guards and ordered out of the building. No protest was allowed—in a way that echoed the current repression on college campuses and the silencing of the left in Israel.
Three possible reasons have been suggested, all of them in my mind plausible. The first, and probably slightest but not insubstantial, is that Dončić is Slovenian and played on the Slovenian National Team in the Olympics last summer. Just before the Olympic trials Slovenia became the fourth European country, along with Norway, Ireland and Spain, to recognize Palestine as a state, seeing in its struggle for freedom a comparable struggle to Slovenia in its breakaway from Yugoslavia. This couldn’t have been anything but irksome for the Mavericks’ Zionist leadership in the moment when Israel was and still is carrying out what Amnesty International has called a genocide, designed to eliminate any future claims for either a Palestinian state or single-state equality.
The second factor involves, of course, money. Had Dončić stayed in Dallas he was eligible at the end of the season for a “Supermax” contract where he would be paid $345 million. With the trade to L.A., that eligibility is voided. It’s very possible the Adelsons wanted to put their money elsewhere.
Adelson’s stated project in Israel is the (illegal) annexation of the West Bank. But she is also a builder, and when Trump outlines his plan for building a luxury Riviera condo project in Gaza, she is a possible natural partner for the construction, especially if the plans include gambling facilities, another Adelson specialty. She and her money have exerted a great influence on Trump’s thinking around Israel and she is so thankful for him that she once claimed there should be a book of the Bible named “Trump.” Future schoolboys and girls will then be asked to recite the first six books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—and Trump.
By the way, as builders the Adelsons are very Trump-like. Their Vegas flagship resort casino, The Venetian, has been involved in lengthy feuds with subcontractors for not paying them, and with the Culinary Workers Union for opening a non-union shop in what is one of the strongest union towns in the U.S. Last year they finally approved a contract, making them the last resort on the strip to unionize. They have also been lax on workers’ safety: Three workers have been killed on their sites. And they’ve been accused of using their former casino for money laundering as well.
The third reason for the trade, though, is probably the most crucial. Texas has limited gambling in the state and large-scale gambling resorts are illegal. Adelson has poured millions into the state legislature trying to get these laws rescinded and open up the state so she can make it another Vegas centered around the massive construction of a new Mavericks arena just outside of Dallas. She contributed $13.7 million to mostly Republican legislators last year to get these restrictions rescinded but to no effect. The laws still stand.
The depleting of the franchise by ridding it of its superstar may have been a warning to the lawmakers that if they do not legalize large-scale gambling in the state, the Adelsons will simply move the franchise which generates $116 million a year for the Texas economy. Depleting the team lowers its value but also turns fans off, thus creating the conditions for either a move out of the state to Vegas or, more probably, threatens the legislators to approve gambling so the franchise remains in the state and can be part of a seamless basketball cum gambling resort where the two are utterly intertwined, just as they now are in the Adelsons’ home state of Nevada. The difference being that Dallas-Fort Worth is a much larger market.
Where ten years ago gambling was still on the fringes of professional sports, now it is at the center. Vegas, once anathema to sports franchises who did not want to be tainted with the charge of bettors fixing games, now has football, hockey, women’s basketball and soccer professional teams with a baseball team on the way and with college sports events now being held there including the epitome of those games, the finals of the college basketball tournament scheduled there for 2028.
A study has shown that money for sports gambling which, since it is online, is now as ubiquitous as pornography, is principally not coming from prior winnings but rather from day-to-day expenditures and contributing to increased bankruptcies, inability to pay loans, and exorbitant debt collection fees.
Gambling is recognized as an addiction in the latest mental health study DSM5—and as Dostoevsky vividly illustrates. His Gambler after winning 600 francs in an hour, then “started to lose…(I) couldn’t control myself and lost everything. After that I took my last money and went to play.”
The Dončić “trade” then may have been designed to open the Texas gambling floodgates for its working- and middle-class Mavericks audiences ever more devastated by Trump’s government cutbacks and coming tax giveaways to billionaires like the Adelsons.
Their compensation: “Start making every moment count.” That’s the phrase used by sports betting companies like Fan Duel to rope fans in and get them to make the first bet where the probability is then 50 percent they will make another one and that the betting will increase by a factor of eight over the next three years.
Welcome to Casino World in Gaza and Dallas.
Note: This piece is also part of episode 2 of a new podcast with Broe and Toby Miller titled “Culture & Barbarism.”
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