Since this past weekend’s trades, I’ve been thinking about power.
Power’s illusions, power’s fluidity, its purpose. I wrote about power and the concept of autonomy for my own newsletter over the weekend, embroiled as I was in an impending tariff trade war and landscape shifting NBA moves. But as responses to the Luka Doncic and Anthony Davis trade, specifically, continue to pile up, differing perceptions of power — who has it, who’s lost it — accumulate with them.
Executives around the league — many catching up on the details of the trade at the same speed as the rest of us — largely seem stunned.
“Every team in the league would have offered everything they could,” an Eastern Conference executive told The Ringer’s Howard Beck. One said it was “shortsighted” while another called the way Mavs GM Nico Harrison acted in relative secret “irresponsible”. Many shared what they would have done in Harrison’s shoes: shopped around, acquired more draft picks, waited until the offseason.
It’s always easier to say what you’d do with power if you were in it.
A through-line in most of the reactions I’ve seen from the NBA’s executive class is surprise that Harrison and the Lakers GM Rob Pelinka were about to keep the trade as quiet as they did. That there were no leaks. The admiration in their observations reveals a funny twist to our perception of power, especially within the NBA. With the league being so public-facing, power gets paired with who wields it loudest; who publicly flexes, who “dunks on” who. That this process was near silent by comparison, and that the silence is what sticks out, speaks volumes about the way power really works without all the trappings that superficially prop it up.
The reality of any trade is that it’s impossible to determine “who won” it before it takes to the floor. Even then, trades can take time to gel. The move Harrison was last criticized for was adding Kyrie Irving to the roster last season, a move that didn’t work until, eventually, it did. Irving acclimatized, he and Doncic sorted out their rhythm. Zoom out further and every trade’s butterfly effect might not be known for years.
Think of the Chris Paul trade vetoed by then-Commissioner, David Stern. Paul was meant to be Kobe Bryant’s protege, next in line for the Lakers glitzy lineage. Stern, wielding duel-power in a double role as NBA Commissioner and acting owner of the Hornets, nixed it. The ripple effects of that decision, in many ways, stretch all the way out to Doncic’s blockbuster trade. Famed like this, assigning winners and losers of trades as they happen is more of a coping mechanism against chaos, of power not really being in any one person’s hands, then actually weighing the trade in a vacuum. No such vacuum exists.
For the most part, reactions from players around the league have been in good humour, even through genuine shock. Anthony Edwards joked that he was scared, throwing his hands up in the locker room and chuckling, “Tim [Connelly], if you’re gonna trade me, let me know.” Nikola Jokic was more blunt, “One team wanted to change, [the] other team wanted to change, and they did something big… Seems like nobody’s safe. And probably [it] should be that way.”
The response from fans and critics to athletes expressing uncertainty, at least that I’ve seen so far, has been telling in terms of how power is viewed. I’ve seen some celebrate that power is shifting away from athletes, that athlete autonomy has gone too far and this move offers a correction. The truth is that no one was ever really “safe” to begin with. In a league where major trades make actual gameplay secondary for a good chunk of the season, and have extended the reach of the NBA’s calendar into the offseason (really, year-round), the lurking shadow of trades is less an elephant in the room than a fixed presence. To function as normal, most players just put the reality out of their heads. If they were as concerned about power as their fans and critics, there’d be no basketball. A good reminder that power — whatever its slippery iteration — comes not from speculation, but with action.
