The most stunning trade in NBA history just went down in the dead of night

LeBron James was at dinner with his family in New York following a virtuoso performance in Madison Square Garden when he was informed his teammate and close friend had been traded for one of basketball’s brightest young superstars.

The Los Angeles Lakers have traded Anthony Davis to the Dallas Mavericks for Luka Doncic in the most shocking trade in the history of the NBA.

It is, by every conceivable measure and near-universal consensus, the most shocking trade in the history of the NBA.

Teams don’t willingly trade away 25-year-old superstars. They certainly don’t do so eight months after competing in the NBA Finals. And they absolutely don’t do it in the middle of the season, with more than 30 games left to play.

But late Saturday night, the Dallas Mavericks agreed to trade one of the league’s brightest talents, Luka Doncic, to the NBA’s glitziest franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers, a person familiar with the deal said. In return, the Mavericks received Los Angeles center Anthony Davis and a first-round pick. One other team -- the Utah Jazz -- and several secondary players were involved, but the immediate clamor over the deal had nothing to do with the nuances of the salary cap.

It was the trade that nobody in the NBA saw coming -- not even the most powerful player in the league. LeBron James, the Lakers’ incumbent star, was dining with family after a win over the New York Knicks when news of the trade broke, according to a person familiar with his movements. Like every other sports fan across the world, James was completely blindsided.

Those fans included Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who roots for the Mavericks and who interrupted his preparation for next week’s Super Bowl to express his heartbreak. “Wait what?” he posted on X. “I’m sick rn....” Over seven years with the Mavericks, the Slovenia-born Doncic has established himself as one of the most efficient offensive weapons in the history of basketball. Since he was 13 years old, when he joined the junior squad of Real Madrid, he has honed an unprecedented skill set. Doncic is a savant who can bury teams under barrages of 3-pointers, dissect them with no-look passes, and bull his way to any and every sector of the floor.

NBA players react to the shocking Davis-Doncic trade.

Last season, Doncic led the NBA in scoring with 33.9 points per game. Then he carried the Mavericks to the brink of a championship, taking the team to the Finals with one clutch performance after another. This season he has missed time with a calf injury, but his 28.1 points per game would be the fourth-most in the league, if he met the playing-time threshold for the leaderboards.

Only three 25-year-olds in NBA history had a higher career scoring average than Doncic’s 28.6, according to Stats Perform. Their names are Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan.

Trades involving players of Doncic’s caliber aren’t entirely unprecedented; in fact, the Lakers landed Abdul-Jabbar 50 years ago, in the summer of 1975. But like most blockbuster basketball trades, that deal had plenty of buildup; Abdul-Jabbar had made it known he wanted to leave Milwaukee, where he had been playing.

The Doncic deal, on the other hand, was preceded by no public request and not a whiff of rumor.

Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison explained the deal as a prudent on-court maneuver, telling ESPN, “I believe that defense wins championships.” Doncic, who has faced questions about his conditioning throughout his career, has never been known as a great defender. Davis, whom Dallas got back in the trade, won the 2020 championship with the Lakers and has led the NBA in blocked shots on three occasions.

LeBron James and Doncic will now be teammates in LA.

But the feeling that rippled through the basketball world in the early hours of Sunday morning suggested something else: that the Lakers have somehow landed the latest in a long line of sport-defining superstars. Their 17 championships have been won by the likes of Kareem, Magic, Shaq, Kobe and LeBron. Now Luka will look to join their ranks.

In the aftermath of the deal, two specific items remain puzzling. The first is its timing. The NBA’s trade deadline isn’t until Thursday afternoon, meaning that the Mavericks could have spent the better part of this week shopping one of basketball’s most sought-after players around for the best possible deal.

The second was the return. Davis is six years older than Doncic, and a lone first-round pick, while useful, is hardly the usual sticker price for a superstar. Consider that when the Knicks traded for Mikal Bridges just this summer, they surrendered four unprotected first-round picks in the deal. Bridges has never made an All-Star team; Doncic is a perennial candidate to win an MVP award.

The rest of the season projects as a transition period for the Lakers. James is now 40, and the franchise will have to begin the process of writing the next chapter of its history with a new main character.

In the nearer term, though, the NBA season will receive an entirely unexpected jolt when Luka and LeBron suit up together in purple and gold. That is, once James has picked his jaw up off the floor.