Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[KillerLeft]

This was very well written and I am going to be mulling this paragraph over the next few weeks as I try to reason with what you've written here. Mostly, if it isn't obvious by now, I was apart of the crew that thought a Luka championship was an inevitability. In fact I thought he'd win multiple rings.

Of course thats a very hard thing to do. And it is ironic to me because I have also had moments in the last couple of years, especially during the regular season, where I thought "hmmm, maybe Luka won't win." But those thoughts did not last long as Luka usually put up an incredible game the following day or had an incredible individual playoff performance that just reinforced my belief this dude was the guy. 

And it stings extra hard, as the Mavs are literally fresh off a finals performance with Luka not looking his best. Who's to say Luka with this team wouldn't have won it all?  They had all the ingredients that worked for him last year, with a lot of additional pieces that we all said we needed after the finals. These are questions we will never have the answer to and as a guy apart of the "Luka WILL win a ring" crowd, it's extremely hard to move on. 

In an ideal world where I had some clairvoyant ability to know this trade was coming and I could choose when they made it, I would've wanted to see at least 1 more playoff run with Luka before they cut ties. Even if they were so sure he was going to break down, I am very confident LA would've given up AD in the summer too just because they were that desperate to find a mega superstar post Lebron. Even with a potentially poor playoff showing by Luka, he'd still have fetched the exact same guys we got 2 weeks ago. That is 1 thing I am very confident on.

So fair, so valid. Right there with you, in a sense. 

The thing is, the guy(s) who traded him want to win. They could absolutely be wrong, but they also had the privilege(?) of watching Luka go about his day-to-day with a closeness we could never imagine. I guess it comes down to whether or not you think Harrison is just delusional or sane. Assuming there was a rational reason for this, and right or wrong, I believe there must have been, imagine how significant that rational reason must’ve been in order for him to pull this particular trigger. 

Then again, maybe I’m struggling like Steve Carell’s character in The Big Short.