Lakers 128, Knicks 112: The Knicks won the Porziņģis trade. Again.
Despite the loss, the Knicks remain a functional contender, which is more than can be said for the Mavericks . . .
On a night Brooklyn won in Houston and Washington won, period, neither surprise came close to being the surprising-ist NBA news of the night, a headline so big and bold the Knicks’ 128-112 loss to the Lakers was immediately preserved in amber, a fossil from a now-bygone era. Strangest of all, despite losing last night’s game, the big news put them squarely in the winners’ circle for a second time for something they did a year before Leon Rose was hired.
You may not have heard, but the Lakers acquired Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris from the Mavericks for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and the Laker first-round pick five years from now. Also, the truffle pig that is Danny Ainge sniffed up a couple second-round picks and Jalen Hood-Schifino, continuing a rich recent history of hyphenated Jazz like Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Juan Toscano-Anderson and Talen Horton-Tucker. Oh, and Luka Dončić is a Laker.
Allllllll kinds of stories and PR blitzes are going to drop the next few days, as billionaires and millionaires prepare to narc on each other to us thousandaires. The first horse outta the barn had Dallas deciding to trade a superstar who turns 26 this month because they don’t trust his conditioning, in return for one who’s 32 next month and is literally nicknamed “Street Clothes.” Just because the D.C. kleptocracy passes executive orders pretending they have power they don’t doesn’t mean we have to play along. Just because the Mavs are spitting bullshit doesn’t mean we have to play along. There are four parties in this deal, two of whom never would have wanted it. One, despite what they say, is Dallas.
Luka is younger, better and still only months from having led them to their third-ever Finals. The Mavs exhausted the bulk of what they had to trade a year ago bulking up their frontcourt, bringing in Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington to pair with then-rookie Dereck Lively Jr. That came a year after acquiring Kyrie Irving and an infamous late-season tank job that netted Lively but risked alienating Dončić. And it worked, spectacularly: last year’s Mavs were 28-23 before the trades, 35-18 after (counting the playoffs) and 19-10 after Luka’s last full game this year, before the calf injury that’s kept him out since. He’s expected to return before the All-Star break, only not for Dallas. Never again for Dallas.
No way Davis wanted this trade, either. Even if LeBron James confided in AD that he’s retiring after this season, and that was enough to make Davis want out of L.A., he wouldn’t ask out before the last months of LBJ’s career. The timing doesn’t add up. I imagine even as great as Davis is, can be and has been for the Lakers, they didn’t have to think much before agreeing to the deal – to the point that it’s hard to imagine the Lakers would have called the Mavs thinking Luka was even available, much less that this would be the best they could get for him, much less that they’d want to trade him to a conference rival with 1000 times more free agent appeal.
That leaves Dallas as the likely culprit. They have new and awful leadership, bottom-of-the-barrel even by NBA owners standards. Maybe the Adelsons don’t give a shit about Mavs fans or competing for trophies. Maybe they crunched the numbers and realized trading Luka means never having to pay him the supermax, and that a lot of NBA owners aren’t paying players supermax money or competing for titles and still making a lot of money while doing so. Maybe they wanna tear it all down, to honor what their orangeranführer is doing to the federal government. Maybe Luka recognizes Palestinians are people. Whatever their reasons, they traded their best player for L.A.’s second-best. They didn’t get their third, Austin Reaves. Didn’t get the Lakers’ other available first-rounder. The most likely suspects behind this weird-ass heist are the ones being robbed.
While I don’t at all relish Laker exceptionalism getting another 10-year infusion, Knicks fans may remember the second half of the 2010s as a time the Dallas franchise took particular joy in belittling New York at almost every turn. In 2017 the Knicks, one spot ahead of the Mavericks in the draft, selected Frank Ntilikina, a player Dallas had been openly lusting after, going so far as to hire Vincent Collett, Frank’s prior coach at Strasbourg, as their Summer League coach. Pro’ly disappointing, I’m sure. I mean, if you wanna kvetch about players your team was one pick away from landing, Knicks fans can do that all day.
But instead the Mavs put on a big show about how they were thrilled with the Knick pick, because that left Dennis Smith Jr. for them to take, and he was so obviously better, so vastly superior, and how blessed they were that a dump-truck of dumb like the Knicks had no idea what they’d just passed on, a virtual basketball god only they, the Mavericks, had been keen enough to detect. 101 games into Smith’s career, Dallas gave up on him, trading him to the Knicks in another deal that somehow was also supposed to reflect poorly on New York.
In 2019 the Knicks traded Kristaps Porziņģis before anyone even knew he was available. Dunno if that was their strategy or just how things broke, but it was the rare big-time NBA trade that offers absolutely no smoke before it bursts into being. Once again the Knicks were a laughingstock and the Mavericks a precious genius of a front office, the only ones bright enough to recognize Magic & Kareem 2.0 when it was staring everybody right in the face. The Knicks were stupid for not giving KP a rookie max extension despite years of evidence (before and since) that for all that body’s God-given talent, God did not design it for 82 games. Yet again, the Knicks were the punchline while the Mavs got ready for their close-up.
Today, the picture looks different when you zoom-out. The Knicks used the cap space freed up in the KP trade to sign Julius Randle, who became a three-time All-Star and two-time All-NBA selection for them. Know how many times Porziņģis did either in Dallas? As many as you. The Knicks have since parlayed Randle into Karl-Anthony Towns, an All-Star and top-10 MVP his first year here. As long as he gets to 65 games, he’ll also earn All-NBA honors. So since the KP deal, the Knicks will have gotten four All-Star selections and three All-NBA honorees from the bigs they’ve moved on with. Meanwhile, KP, now in his 10th season, has only been an All-Star once – as a Knick.
Dallas turned Porziņģis into Spencer Dinwiddie and Dāvis Bertāns. Dinwiddie was traded soon thereafter to Brooklyn in the Kyrie deal, while Bertāns was part of the draft-night shenanigans that went into landing Lively. Irving and Lively appeared to fit in beautifully alongside Dončić. Now they appear to be built and based around AD staying healthy and Kyrie staying interested. Good luck with that.
