The prevailing sentiment among NBA fans when the Los Angeles Lakers made a late-night blockbuster to acquire Luka Doncic from the Dallas Mavericks was that it had to be fake. Many assumed that ESPN’s Shams Charania had his social media account hacked, prompting him to send a follow-up confirming the reality of the trade: that Doncic was headed to L.A. in exchange for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a first-round pick.
For the Lakers, the trade was franchise-altering. It allows them to completely reset their long-term future by adding a superstar at the very start of his prime years, and now have time to build around one of the five best players in all of basketball, while still being able to contend for a championship this season alongside LeBron James.
It could go down as the most shocking trade in NBA history. And that isn’t just the case from a fan perspective. Even Charania was stunned by the news he was receiving, and had to quickly figure out if the rumors were real before reporting it, according to Jimmy Traina of Sports Illustrated:
“Adrenaline rush in the craziest way. Me myself, in a lot of ways, I’m a fan. I’m a fan of the game. I’m a fan of the NBA first. I was probably just as floored as all the audience was and everyone around the league was when I got wind of it about five minutes before I hit send.
“I got wind that it was done and then you go into your mode of “Is this real? Is this really happening?” You try to confirm with a few more people and even then, I was still in a state of shock, but the job is to report the news and you do it accurately. Once I got three, four, five confirmations, I obviously ran with it. But the time from when I heard it to when I tweeted it, it was five minutes and that five minutes was used to triple, quadruple, quintuple verify it.”
Charania said that he knew about the Lakers and Mavericks discussing something, but had no clue it would be a deal of this magnitude. He likely assumed, along with everyone else in the basketball world, that Doncic was untouchable:
“There’s every emotion you can think of. There’s anxiety, there’s nervousness, there’s being scared, there’s being floored, stunned.
“I had gotten wind a few days prior that these two teams might be talking, but you never think it’s around Luka Dončić and Anthony Davis.
“In today’s world and society and sports, everything is rumored, everything ideated by everyone. So, for this to happen, really bang-bang the way it did, obviously Rob Pelinka and Nico Harrison did an amazing job keeping this tight lipped.”
For even the NBA’s biggest news-breaker to be stunned by a deal shows just how unexpected it was. Charania has seen it all over the course of his career, and nothing has warranted a reaction to this level until now.
Rob Pelinka involved Jeanie Buss immediately in Luka Doncic deal
The relationship between Rob Pelinka and Nico Harrison has been spoken about plenty and that undoubtedly made the trade talks a bit easier. But in any move of this magnitude, the team owner has to be involved in the decision, and Pelinka involved Lakers owner Jeanie Buss immediately once the discussions began.
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