Relying on Anthony Davis's availability is like setting foot on a rotted, rickety trapdoor and believing you'll be able to take another step. Beneath the trapdoor, in this analogy, is hell. Nico Harrison and Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont arranged it this way: By making it about a championship window, by calling their popular world-beating superstar an unreliable toxic fatso on his way out, by shrinking the period of observation down to the near term, the Mavericks all but announced This has to work right away. It became a piece of basketball wisdom so cheap and obvious that bothering to articulate it aloud had the ironic effect of making the speaker look somehow less knowledgeable about the sport: All of whatever they imagine makes Davis more valuable than Doncic to the present-day Mavericks relies upon Davis being upright. Davis does lots of things, many of them great and wonderful, but one of the things he does a lot is get hurt. And after not even three quarters of basketball in a Mavericks uniform, Davis got hurt.
He was playing very well Saturday, dominating the Houston Rockets and helping the Mavs to a 17-point halftime lead. Davis's skill and versatility popped immediately. He opened the game with a post touch against a positional mismatch, pulled in a help defender, scanned the court, and threw a perfect lob pass to Daniel Gafford for an alley-oop. Seconds later he swatted a layup from Alperen Sengun, gathered the rebound, led the break, and dished ahead to P.J. Washington for a transition dunk. Minutes later Davis dribbled the ball into the front court, sized up another mismatch, backed his defender into the paint, and turned over his shoulder for a calm jump hook. By halftime, Davis had 24 points, 13 rebounds, five assists, and three blocks, and the Mavericks had won his 21 minutes by a convincing 17 points. Harrison, who'd relinquished his seats in the arena due to the intensity of fan backlash, was for sure hearing the swelling music, if not the actual sounds of the game.
The music turned to screeching horror violins late in the third quarter. The Mavericks were up eight points and Davis was defending a high pick-and-roll, backpedaling into the paint in front of Jalen Green. Green slipped a pocket pass to Sengun; Davis pivoted his weight onto his right foot, screamed, grabbed at the region of his dick and balls, and went to the floor. He walked up the court in obvious pain and hid in the corner, perfectly stationary, through the following possession. When the ball went back the other way, Davis did not. The referees badly missed Dante Exum attempting to commit a take foul, but eventually play was halted, and Davis left the court for good.
Davis sounded confident after the game, describing the injury as not serious. Then news broke Sunday that Davis will miss "multiple weeks" and possibly a month or more. It's possible that the severity of the injury, undoubtedly linked to the abdominal troubles that have dogged him all season, surprised Davis. It's also possible that he's so used to missing weeks of a regular season that he doesn't consider an injury that takes him out of action for approximately half of what is left of this one to be very significant. Davis was a reasonably healthy young guy, years ago, but he's played more than 62 games in a season just once since he turned 25 years old. Since the start of the 2018–19 NBA reason, Davis has played in 13 fewer regular-season contests than Joel Embiid. There hasn't been the same sense of compounding, cascading failures, but Davis is another sublimely talented big guy who is almost never fully healthy.
I don't think it's too baldly insane to prefer Davis to Doncic in one game of basketball, or in one series of games. For one thing, Davis has won a title. When he's healthy, he can make a defense all on his own. He can pile up points without needing to handle the ball, and he can make other players' jobs easier without even touching it. As he showed in the bubble playoffs, a fully operational and motivated Davis has end-to-end powers of destruction shared by maybe only one or two other players in the sport. This is not my way of defending the Doncic trade—I hate it, it sucks, it makes me eight or 10 percent less interested in the entire league—but Mavericks fans wouldn't have been crazy to allow themselves a whisper of hope, that however much it hurt to see an all-timer of a homegrown player go to the goddamn Lakers, they themselves might pull from the wreckage the consolation of a championship.
They still might! But that will be the only consolation, and the chances were already remote. After 2026 there's a four-year stretch where the Mavericks control outright only one first-round draft pick, the one they snagged from the Lakers in exchange for their future. This injury is reality hitting the team's arena with the force of an asteroid: Davis has to be healthy for whatever is left of his prime for this to work. If it doesn't work, and pending the pulling of some painful ripcords, the Mavericks are going to exit the Davis era pretty close to barren. However much Dumont believes of his own bullshit about culture and character and not taking vacations, the Mavericks sold off one of the sport's three best players, and the "championship-winning outcome" their owner has highlighted as compensation now depends upon someone less dependable than Joel damn Embiid.
So Davis's groin region needs to get better in a hurry. This is the deal Dumont and Harrison made, and it looked bad even when Davis was ambulatory. If he can't play, all that's left is to look to the future, and that's where things get really fucking grim.
