Can you build a defense without a hero?

The Dallas Mavericks traded superstar Luka Doncic citing the need to build a championship defense in order to win titles. Are they right?

Basketball isn’t quite as tribal or warlike as football and the nature of it is less “root for the boys defending our home!” and more “this is our champion!” It’s like the Iliad, with individuals fighting each other in epic battles while the fates of many hang in the balance. It’s also like the Iliad in the way interpersonal conflicts and betrayal often define storylines.

Who fights whom and why?

Luka Doncic is certainly one of the more interesting superstars and thus mythical heroes of his time.

Coming out of Real Madrid to the NBA there was a lot of debate about what sort of player he’d be, if there was a NBA comparison that made sense, and if we could trust his domination of the Euro leagues as a teenager. It all sounds ridiculous now but that was the debate and two teams chose to take athletic center DeAndre Ayton and athletic power forward Marvin Bagley over Luka while a third traded down to the Mavericks in order to get Trae Young instead.

Fortunately for Dallas, then owner and manager Mark Cuban and his organization (to the extent you could ever describe the Mavericks in that fashion) had determined Luka was the guy in this draft.

It became apparent very quickly that Luka was something akin to James Harden or old LeBron James. Unbelievably dominant with the ball in his hands and making decisions but not particularly good on the defensive end. After just a few seasons though and some down to the wire battles with the LA Clippers in the playoffs, the Mavericks made a Western Conference Finals run behind Luka by putting him on the floor with a few key defenders around him.

In particular, the Mavs ran a lot of small-ball lineups with German Maxi Kleber as a switchable center, and opposing perimeter threats checked by “three’n’D” wings Dorian Finney-Smith and Reggie Bullock.

Two years later the Mavs made a run at the finals after making some late moves that gave them a strong center rotation of rim-protectors and perimeter defenders Derrick Jones Jr and PJ Washington. By this point Luka’s place in Dallas Maverick history was secured as the rightful heir to Dirk Nowitzki’s throne.

One year later? The new Mavericks ownership and their general manager Nico Harrison have traded the most beloved star in the city of Dallas to the hated Los Angeles Lakers in pursuit of a “championship defense” to get over the hump in order to win the Finals in the near future.

Most of Dallas is regarding this as a mortal sin, but it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

The key to championship defense in the NBA

As I argued when writing about the NBA playoffs last season, there’s a sort of “rule of three” that applies to pro basketball lineups if you want to win at the highest level.

Everyone knows you want your center to be good at protecting the paint and rim from easy shots by the opposing offense. In the modern era teams have become so good at shooting and spacing out defenders that it’s hard for a big, lumbering center to hang near the basket in order to contest shots. Ideally you actually have a big man who can play good help defense but also extend out to the perimeter like a Draymond Green, Anthony Davis, Bam Adebayo, or similar guy.

That’s not even the most crucial ingredient though. The most crucial ingredient is the wings. You want one good on-ball defender who can match up with fast, dangerous guards on the perimeter and another good on-ball defender with the size to contest a bigger point forward. Just as an example, if you wanted to guard the Mavericks effectively last year you needed someone who could do a credible job of checking Luka Doncic without just getting steamrolled for an easy 30-40 points and another defender who could do likewise on Kyrie Irving.

At 6-foot-7, 240-270 pounds, Luka is a unique problem with a blend of dribble penetration skill and post footwork. Kyrie is the epitome of handles, speed, and coordination. The Boston Celtics had endless options but ultimately they could use point guard-destroyer Jrue Holiday on Kyrie and the stout Jaylen Brown on Luka and be in good shape, which helped lead to their championship a year ago.

To navigate the playoffs, you generally need to beat teams who have one or both of those sorts of players guiding their offense. Either the darting quick creator like Steph Curry, Devin Booker, Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, or Jaylen Brunson or the “apex predator” point forward like Jayson Tatum, LeBron James, Jimmy Butler, or Luka Doncic.

The challenge for the Dallas Mavericks, along with any other team with a gifted creator at the helm of their offense who isn’t necessarily good at defense, was ensuring they had those key pieces around Luka. With the acquisition of Irving, that meant the remaining three starters had to be defensively inclined.

Much like with LeBron James in Cleveland, the ideal lineups for the Mavericks would surround Luka with good spot-up shooters so he’d have spacing and targets to kick the ball out to. However, those guys would also ideally be able to handle all of the heavy lifting defensively because God knows Luka wasn’t up for checking an opposing team’s best player like a prime LeBron James back in the day.

From hearing Nico Harrison or other Mav executives talk, this sounds difficult and confounded by the fact that Luka’s teammates also have to be happy doing a lot of dirty work and spending much of their time watching him dribble.

Here’s the problem though with this argument. In fact, it was relatively easy. There’s a reason the Mavs were able to assemble those two different teams, one at the trade deadline, that made runs at the title. The reason is that you don’t need great players around Luka. 3’n’D wings who will guard and wait in the corner to take catch and shoot threes are increasingly common as professional basketball players orient their skill development around what can draw a paycheck.

Luka’s decision-making and offensive skill was so great that it made it easy to surround him with offensive scrubs and cast-offs and still have a potent half-court offense. Additionally, and often less remarked upon, Luka’s size (mentioned often by the Mavs since they decided to trade him) may have leaned towards “too heavy” but his larger build also made it easier to hide him on defense.

When the Warriors want to hide the similarly offensively combustible Steph Curry on defense, they have to find guys for him to hide on who aren’t too much larger than him and he’s 6-foot-3 (maybe) and 200 pounds. At 6-foot-7 with thickness and rebounding skills, Luka can always hide on the least dangerous opposing player and not get killed by offensive rebounding or some random player rediscovering a post-up game from their high school days.

The Lakers already built a champion, based around defense, with a very similar player…LeBron James. The 2020 bubble James who won a title as well as the more recent LeBron Lakers who made solid runs in the playoffs always had topnotch defenses with LeBron doing a lot of the heavy lifting to make half court offense work while hiding on defense. They did this by getting good perimeter defenders to put around him like Jarred Vanderbilt, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Dennis Schroder, Alex Caruso, and of course big man Anthony Davis.

The Anthony Davis Mavericks

These are now the Anthony Davis Dallas Mavericks. The franchise didn’t even shop Luka around, they zeroed in on Anthony Davis as the best possible return, and went for it.

In fact, it almost seems they approached this from a “how could we acquire Anthony Davis from the Lakers to build our defensive-minded team around?” and settled on “we’ll just have to trade Luka.” I don’t think that’s what happened, but that’s the extent to which they have clearly fixated on the Unibrow (Davis) as the key piece in Dallas.

This actually reminds me of when Mark Cuban was always chasing centers, even to the point of letting Tyson Chandler walk after he’d delivered them a title, in order to chase Dwight Howard in free agency. My man Jonathan Tjarks later noted he had to pull over and smoke a cigarette when that news hit the radio waves. I can only imagine his response to this news would be to quickly acquire a pack of cigs, chain smoke half the pack, then finally offer “well, $350 million is a lot of money…and he was pretty immature.”

So anyways, the Mavs now add Davis to the roster based off his recent run of playoff value (2020 title, 2023 WCF) which has all occurred as a “small ball center” paired with LeBron James. If you wanted to recreate the 2020 magic it would seem the move was to get Davis to play WITH Luka Doncic. Incidentally, the Mavericks also already have two good centers on the team. Perhaps that number will go down before the trade deadline but in the meantime they’re left with a theoretical starting lineup that goes:

• PG: 32-year old (soon to be 33) Kyrie Irving playing through a bulging disk.

• SG: 34-year old Klay Thompson who can no longer defend top guards.

• SF: PJ Williams, moved away from his place as a small ball 4 by this move.

• PF: Anthony Davis, now spun down from center to forward.

• C: Daniel Gafford, a non-shooter now clogging the lane for the new acquisition.

Presumably the Mavs will go small at key moments in the playoffs and pull someone from the bench, but this will now mean benching both of the centers already on the roster. In terms of putting an on-ball defender for guards and an on-ball defender for forwards on the floor, that will hinge on playing Max Christie, who came with Davis in the trade.

If they find they need another creating guard, the current options are Spencer Dinwiddie and…that’s it. If he’s on the floor, Christie better be as well since neither Dinwiddie nor Kyrie are guarding another team’s top guard in the playoffs.

Overall the Mavs have two massive problems now they’ve created for themselves with this deal.

1. Three of their better 7-8 players play the same position and spinning Davis down to a 4 may be a decent regular season ploy to keep tread on the tires, but it won’t work in the playoffs.

2. The guy who made it easy to play offensively limited but defensive-minded players is now gone and there’s no one left to facilitate half court offense.

Everything now hinges on Kyrie creating offense for the entire team as an injured 33-year old. That’s a tough bet in terms of finishing this season, in which the Mavs are currently 26-24 (9th in the West) with 32 games left to play. In the playoffs? Opposing teams will assign their top perimeter defender to Irving and double him in key moments. Does Irving still have the juice and health to thrive under that focus? Probably not, and he’s never been great when teams double his drives.

Doubling Luka was certain death.

Irving has always been at his best playing off another primary creator, particularly LeBron and Luka.

For the purpose of creating a win-now team, this feels like a massive blunder. The Mavericks may have more moves to make but they don’t have many draft picks to use in making additional trades, having already used them up in past years to put a winning team around Luka.

What really happened here?

Mavs fans are absolutely reeling. Watching the Cowboys be mismanaged year after year by egotistical Jerry Jones was bad enough but for Mark Cuban to sell the Mavericks to these outsiders who then allowed Nico Harrison to angrily trade away the city’s favorite star in the dead of night was really something else.

Many have argued that the crime here is worse than the blunder. That even if this move was effective, it’d still be unforgivable because of the attachment Luka had to the people of the Metroplex. There’s even conspiracy theories floating around that the new owners, the Adelsons, plan to move the Mavericks to Las Vegas and thus have no interest in maintaining a positive relationship with the fans and might even be incentivized to damage it.

That feels like a reach.

Nonetheless, the immediate reactions to the trade have all been pretty conspiratorial.

1st reaction: Shams Charania was hacked, this isn’t a real trade that happened.

2nd reaction: What’s wrong with Luka? Did he blow an achilles? No…it must be worse than that, he’s only 25. Is he on an FBI watchlist? Are we about to find out he’s been banned from every spa in Dallas?

3rd reaction: It can’t just be that he’s not serious enough about conditioning or playing defense. Dude isn’t even old enough to rent a car, there’s still a chance he matures significantly in the coming years…what else is going on??? Are the owners trying to get their casino going by moving the team to Vegas?

We’ve yet to arrive at something satisfying. The best we can do is that Nico Harrison has accumulated a lot of power and control in Dallas under indifferent ownership and had a deep, personal dislike of Luka and his approach to the game.

That isn’t good enough for the fans (who cares? He took us to the Finals last year!) and this will probably go down as the day that Mavs basketball died. When the basketball principles I laid out above come to bear on the Mavericks, there will be nowhere to hide from the gravity of what has occurred.

Nevermind what happens if Luka translates the pain of this experience and natural prefrontal cortex development under the tutelage of fitness gurus LeBron James and JJ Reddick out in Los Angeles.

RAGE:
Sing, blogboyz, of Luka’s rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Mavs
Incalculable pain, pitched countless contracts
Of players into trade machine's dark,
And left their pay to drive up ticket prices
For socialites and hoop heads, as Silver's will was done.
Begin with the clash between Harrison--
The Maverick GM--and godlike Luka.