From Court to Couch: What the Luka Dončić Trade Teaches Us About Group Dynamics

As a preface to what I’m writing about now and hopefully in the future, I’ll briefly speak about the origins of my love for basketball. My earliest and most vivid memories of the sport are watching the 2001 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. Without really understanding anything about basketball, I was still entranced by the competitiveness and aerial acrobatics that were being put on display. That was the start of me harboring dreams of becoming a professional athlete. Dreams which did not come to fruition, but birthed in me a love for the sport, and sport in general, ever since then. 

I’m a therapist, not a professional athlete, and I cannot help but to blend these two facts of my experience, to examine sports through the psychological lens of my profession and perhaps share the combination of these two things through my writing. 

A transaction took place between two sports teams last week that by most accounts is viewed as the biggest trade in the history of the NBA, if not the history of professional sports. The Dallas Mavericks traded their start player, Luka Dončić, to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for one of their star players, Anthony Davis. 

Other details were involved but that was the headline, and rightfully so. Decisions involving someone who is considered to be one of the best in the world at their sport do tend to reverberate across multiple channels. The media coverage has been extensive and warranted, and rather than rehash what has already been said, or focus on individuals alone. I want to examine what happened from a group context in order to highlight the other characters involved and understand the situation from a different perspective. 

Why Was Luka Doncic Traded?

The decision to invite a new person into a group or to kick someone out of a group is not made on impulse alone. There may not be an abundance of forethought, but there is at least some consideration given to this decision before it is made. The feeling of wanting to make a change is present in the group before it is ever given verbal expression. It is a process in and of itself for a group to accept and acknowledge the presence of hostile feelings towards one of its members and the possible implications of allowing those feelings to surface in the group. Typically the group allows (or elects) one person in the group to take on the task of being the first person to verbalize their feelings. It is only after this that the rest of the group members can openly respond to the hostile feelings which have been present. 

The Mavericks seem to have made their first acknowledgement of their hostile feelings towards Dončić sometime in January. They did so in the form of a hypothetical question, a soft lob thrown in the direction of the Los Angeles Lakers. Well, would you trade for Luka Dončić? As is the case in groups, strong sentiments are initially shared in a manner that hides the depth of feelings behind them. Hypotheticals often hide the reality of strong desires. 

Reasons for the trade have been discussed ad nauseam. Dončić drank and ate too much and worked out too little. He was temperamental and by their estimation, too expensive. I’m not particularly interested in any of that. My interest is in examining the privileged position Dončić had within the Mavericks organization (their figurative group), how he came to occupy it, and the reasons his position changed so drastically. 

On the face of it the answer is simple. Dončić is a phenom and the culture of the NBA is that players of his caliber are empowered almost immediately. Because they are exceptional, organizations quickly become beholden to them. Every NBA team is a group with established norms and ways of functioning. 

Drafting a player is tantamount to inviting a new person into the group. In most cases the new member must quickly adjust to the rules of the group, but in the case of Dončić, who was so unique, he did not have to make the same adjustment. When someone who enters the group is viewed this way, the group responds by changing to fit the needs of the individual. There is an immediate shift in power within the group. 

This shift represents the renegotiation of a new agreement amongst the members of the group. Under these circumstances the new agreement is essentially this: the group will give up its individual and collective power in exchange for the benefits the individual can provide. In sports, teams give up control to star players because they believe their individual performance will result in organizational success. Such is the case with the Mavericks, who believed Dončić was the key to future success.  

Or at least they did. The first domino to fall, which led to this sequence of events, was the Mavericks losing their belief in Dončić. Ironically it was their success, not their failure, that led to this conclusion. 

The Mavericks have been criticized for trading away a player who led them to the NBA finals just last season. This is taken as proof of Dončić’s ability to eventually lead a team to a championship. But the Mavericks view it as proof positive of the exact opposite. Their loss to the Celtics in the NBA finals did two things. It showed the Mavericks they were good enough to get to the Finals but nowhere near good enough to win a championship. Secondly, it removed the spectre of hope from the Mavericks. Not completely, but resoundingly enough to cause some people to lose faith in Dončić, the person who had been given so much power within the group. 

The Underlying Power Dynamics

General managers of sports teams at times function like group therapists. They are responsible for looking after the safety and well-being  of the group members and ensuring the group is functioning well as a whole. Managers do not act alone and operate within the structure created by ownership, whose presence also impacts the group even if they are not explicitly a part of it. My view is that Nico Harrison, the Mavericks general manager, acted freely in deciding to trade Dončić, but his actions were not free from outside influence. 

Harrison, as is typical of people in his position, was chosen by the group to carry out their wishes. A lot of time has been spent trying to understand exactly whose wishes Harrison was carrying out, but this hard to know because there appears to have been factions or subgroups within the Mavericks organization. These subgroups exist within the Mavericks organization and the larger group that is the NBA and can be identified by the way they responded to the trade. These groups can be divided into players, management, and ownership. Each groups response reveals something about their competing agendas, all of which impact the group dynamics.  

The player’s response has mostly been a negative one. They were shocked by what occurred, protesting the unfairness of it, pondered what it meant for them, and quickly came to the conclusion that it meant no player was safe.  

Groups will sometimes elect one of their members to play the role of scapegoat, to take the blame for the group’s lack of progress. As the pressure builds, the scapegoat is eventually expelled from the group. Their may be a momentary feeling of relief now that the problem is gone, but relief is followed by fear and panic. 

This happens because on a deeper level members are aware that the problems of the group are always about more than one individual, and will persist even after the individual is gone. They know that if someone like Dončić can be scapegoated and unceremoniously traded, the same could also happen to them. The group trembles at this realization, and the part they played in bringing it about.  

The common response from players is to think about the personal impact trades have on them. Management, acting as de facto group leaders, must respond by trying to help the group adjust to this change and restore group cohesion. Harrison has done this by trying to instill hope and outlining a positive vision of the future of his group, His belief is that the group will function better now and is better positioned to accomplish their ultimate goal, winning a championship.

This is the appropriate response, but it is not always easy to restore group cohesion but doing so can be a challenge. For the Mavericks, they have had to contend with raucous and emotionally charged reaction from their fans, one they likely did not fully anticipate. This highlights another important aspect of group dynamics. While not directly involved, fans, like family and friends of group members, can exert a large amount of influence on group dynamics. Especially when they are activated by something going on within the group. 

Ownership could take a supportive stance which could bring clarity or help the group move their discomfort towards acceptance. It seemed like Mavericks ownership would have rather not done that given their initial silence in the aftermath of the announcement. A silence that was broken via an interview that was published over the weekend, and almost certainly was motivated by the fact that fans staging protest in front of the American Airlines Arena where the Mavericks play. They seem to prefer to stay in the background, but this choice along with others they make may be the most significant because they lead to a repetition of the same group dynamics that led the Mavericks to this moment in time. 

It has already begun to happen. After the trade a narrative quickly began to emerge about Kyrie Irving now being the leader of the team (group). Over the weekend, after Anthony Davis made his impressive Mavericks debut there was a coalescing around the idea of him being the potential leader of the Mavericks. Another uniquely talented player whose presence once again entices the group into placing their hopes and wishes and power inside of him.

The storm within the Mavericks organization reached its climax with the trade of Luka Dončić and that storm will inevitably come to an end. A new group is forming. They are establishing their own norms and formulating their own agreements, and despite an overall structure that mostly remains the same as it was previously, their is hope that this particular group will take them to new heights. 

We shall see.