Right now I would like to punch something, hard enough to make jelly of my fist. Not because I am a fan of the Washington Wizards! Nowadays being a fan of the Wizards means hoping they will lose—they trained me for this, by trying hard for six months to lose as much as possible—and I'll be damned if I can switch off that impulse in time for the draft lottery. Unto the Wizards I say: Ha ha! Screwed by fate, but not a cruel one: A just and righteous fate, a Rod Serling-ish fate rather than a Stephen King-ish one. Also screwed by the universe: the Utah Jazz and the Charlotte Hornets, fellow practitioners of the Vomit Arts. Owned to hell, all of you! Ha ha!
Still, this morning I would like to ram my head into one of those industrial rock smashers, because of who won the lottery. The son-of-a-gun Dallas Mavericks—those selfsame bozos who just torched their future, proudly and defiantly, for a foundation of two unreliable and rapidly eroding veteran stars—jumped an incredible 10 spots and won the top overall pick in the 2025 draft. Their odds of winning were less than two freakin' percent. A third of the damn league had better odds of landing that pick; a solid seven of those teams might even have been able to say they deserved a friendly turn from the cosmos. Instead, fortune smiled down on the asshole Mavericks, to my mind the very most odious option of all. Screw.
That damn piece-of-crap Nico Harrison, after spending three months bleating about how his trade of Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers could be judged entirely on his team's performance during a three- to four-year championship window, now gets first crack at Duke's 18-year-old super-prospect Cooper Flagg, who is generally talked about as a sure-thing star-level NBA player. If the Mavericks stand pat and take Flagg (or either of the other two big-time prospects, Rutgers' Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey), Harrison will get to say that his trade of Doncic set the Mavericks up to contend now and in the future. If, on the other hand, the Mavericks want to go all-in on whatever is left of the prime years of Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis, Harrison now also has the ammunition to put together a basically unbeatable trade offer for half-gruntled Milwaukee superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, who Shams Charania of ESPN says is newly "open-minded about whether his best fit is remaining in Milwaukee—or playing elsewhere." Fuck!
What is most disgusting to me about all of this is that the Mavericks are so completely screwed, draft-wise, after next summer. They control precisely zero of their own first-round picks between the years 2026 and 2031. Whatever dark favor they've bought from, I don't know, literal Satan, it had to be redeemed this year or next, during the brief stretch when the diminishing vitality of that rickety Irving-Davis duo was most likely to keep them out of easy reach of the top part of a draft. Without Monday's outrageous good fortune, there was a very good chance that the team's majority owner, 79-year-old Trump-loving ultra-Zionist freak Miriam Adelson, would already be dead as hell before the franchise next sniffed relevance.
Now she and vile son-in-law Patrick Dumont get to have like nine different cakes and eat them, too: They are suddenly fat with opportunities, reasonably set up for the near term and the far, and able to enjoy any torments suffered by their trade counterparts, who now find themselves the outfit twisting in a condition of relative asset-poverty. It was not supposed to be like this.
My own personal blackheartedness aside, it's possible to feel a certain relief today for Mavericks fans. They got well and truly screwed by the Doncic trade, and were staring down an almost unendurably bleak future. Now, provided Harrison declines to trade the first overall pick for, like, Joel Embiid, they can get excited about their basketball team, and dare to hope that bad ownership might not matter very much for the next little while. Also, this is a decent enough outcome for Flagg, who in theory could step into a manageable role beside some very solid veterans, rather than going to D.C. and being handed the keys to a burning clown car. And I'm sort of happy for Davis, and for Klay Thompson, and for your various Max Christies and Naji Marshalls and Daniel Gaffords: One way or another, their team is positioned to get stronger, and inevitably in such a way that a share of the burden of Saving Basketball In Dallas is distributed onto another set of shoulders.
But I'd considered all of that going in, and I was still happy to think of the Mavericks being stuck in 11th place, drafting some future sixth man, grinding through most of next season sans Irving, and then settling in for a solid decade of nauseating comeuppance. The thought of Adelson and Dumont smiling their terrible smiles today is downright unbearable; I imagine Harrison strutting around triumphantly, talking excitedly of Flagg's BMI and pretending like this was the plan all along, and I want, sincerely, to shoot a harpoon through my own heart. It's a blessing of sorts that the Mavericks sent none of these people to the lottery event, so that we could be spared their evident joy and relief. On the other hand, an image so poisonous would be appropriately disgusting, a target upon which to train a glare of cathartic, pyromaniacal contempt. Instead they sent out dopey-ass Rolando Blackman, a Maverick of a bygone era. An innocent! Curse them!
All else being equal—the Doncic trade cleanly Eternal Sunshine'd right out of my mind; Harrison, Dumont, and Adelson wedged head-down in a latrine someplace—the top pick going to a well-coached team that swam against adversity and made the play-in would be a very happy outcome. And the Hornets (four), Jazz (five), and Wizards (six) all dropping out of the top three of a three-player draft would be a delicious cherry on top. It's good when bad things happen to cynical piece-of-crap pro sports outfits, and the suffering of these three franchises would otherwise be a real delight of an outcome. Unfortunately, because that outcome was paid for with the absolute horseshit of a victory for the pompous, scolding, exquisitely incompetent Mavericks, I would now prefer to be dead. Thanks for nothing, reality.
