Goodbye, Mavericks. That was weird

Dallas waves the white flag. PLUS: The East bracket is set.

Good morning. Special Saturday issue! Let’s basketball.

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The Death of Marat; Jacques-Louis David; 1793

A pocket of prominent Mavericks fans have been pointing out for the last couple of weeks — since the disaster weekend against the Charlotte Hornets — that Dallas should simply pack it up, try to miss the playoffs and focus on keeping the first round pick they owe to the Knicks as a result of the Kristaps Porzingis trade a few years ago. That pick is top-10 protected this year, and the Mavs have been on the threshold of being the 10th or 11th worst team as they have been flirting with missing the play-in entirely.

The stakes: make the play-in and likely lose the pick, or miss the play-in and more likely keep the pick.

The Mavericks had continued to fight for that play-in spot. They knocked off a Kings team trying to win the No. 2 seed just two days ago. Amid all the hullabaloo over the potential to just give up early, Luka Doncic made it clear that he would continue to play so long as the Mavericks had a chance. The franchise seemed to support his desire to do so. They didn’t control their own destiny, but they could still make it in if a few things broke right. The Thunder have been struggling of late, and the Mavericks closed with a pair of very winnable games.

Alas. The Mavericks announced early Friday that Kyrie Irving wouldn’t play, and then announced that other key players not named Luka would miss the game. Dallas was hosting “Slovenia Night” at the arena, so apparently Doncic needed to play. Before the game, Jason Kidd shared that Luka would play the first quarter and then his season would be over.

Luka didn’t attend media availability after the game.

The Mavericks pulled Luka as planned — though he actually got one more possession after the quarter break in an apparent attempt to get him a final standing ovation of the season. At halftime, Kidd benched Jaden Hardy and Dwight Powell on account of being too good to guarantee a loss to a Bulls team sitting their two best players on account of already having clinched the No. 10 seed in the East. The Mavericks led by 13 at the half.

Here’s how the game and the Mavericks’ season ended.

This is not the first time a team has tanked. The Blazers are becoming late-season masters of the form, and the Jazz have been quietly bowing out of the postseason discourse for about two months now, both by trading effective players while in the race and by sitting apparently healthy stars now and then.

But this performance by the Mavericks is the first time in memory that a team has pulled a healthy player in the middle of a game they needed to stay alive in the postseason hunt this close to the end of the season. It’s a new frontier of tanking, whether Mavericks fans want to admit it or not. The Mavericks had a chance to make the postseason — a slim chance, sure, but a chance nonetheless — and purposefully declined it with 72 hours left in the season …

… just about two months to the day after trading two starters and a future first-round pick for Kyrie Irving, who will be a free agent when the season ends on Sunday night …

… and who demanded a trade from the Brooklyn Nets on account of not receiving a long-term contract offer he felt suitable to his talents …

… despite playing in just 46% of Brooklyn’s games the prior three seasons due to injuries, sabbaticals and vaccine-related disqualifications.

This is an incredible turn of events, and one no NBA fan should soon forget. My mind keeps coming back to the fact that the Mavericks are doing all this to delay sending a pick to the Knicks, a pick owed for a prior attempt to find Luka a co-star, an attempt that had already been determined to be a failure before this season. It makes you wonder what shenanigans the Mavericks will be up to when the first round pick owed to Brooklyn from the Irving trade comes due. Will the Mavericks still be searching, or will Luka be long gone by then?

Will the cycle of doom still turn in Dallas?