Danny Ainge didn’t know details of Luka Doncic-Anthony-Davis trade until it was too late

Danny Ainge didn’t know details of Luka Doncic-Anthony-Davis trade until it was too late

On Saturday night, all hell broke loose on social media and elsewhere when ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania reported that the Dallas Mavericks traded superstar guard Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis. Though there was a third team involved: Utah Jazz.

Of course, in a trade like this, Danny Ainge found a way to get involved. The Jazz didn’t trade anything away while acquiring two 2025 second-round picks as well as second-year guard Jalen Hood-Schifino. But according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, Ainge was blindsided like the rest of us when it came to the magnitude of the deal:

“Even the Utah Jazz, the third team that facilitated the transaction by collecting two second-round picks for absorbing Jalen Hood-Schifino, didn’t know Doncic and Davis were a part of the deal until about an hour before it was completed, league sources said,” MacMahon wrote. “Even Jazz president Danny Ainge, who hails from the Lakers’ hated rival, the Boston Celtics, had about only 30 minutes notice, sources said, that Los Angeles was about to acquire Doncic to be the new face of its franchise. But by then it was too late to do much about it. NBA history was about to be altered.”

Nico Harrison: “The easiest thing for me to do is nothing, and everyone would praise me for doing nothing. But we really believe in it. Time will tell if I'm right.”

ESPN story with @ramonashelburne on how the “unfathomable” Luka Doncic trade happened: https://t.co/W6ZVV6UYUT

— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) February 3, 2025

NBA Players, social media explodes into frenzy after Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis blockbuster

Ainge will always take draft capital and stack assets when he can, but I can’t help but imagine his reaction when he initially got the call from Nico Harrison, Rob Pelinka or reps in either front office about facilitating the deal. He probably thought it was April Fool’s two months too early.

It now makes me wonder if there were other groundbreaking NBA trades that the third- or fourth-team didn’t know the ramifications until it was about to be called into the league.

Regardless, this deal was a different animal–nobody really knew of Pelinka and Harrison (plus ownership), allegedly. Doncic is a generational talent while Davis is one of the best two-way players in the NBA. If you gave me 100 guesses about the biggest trades ahead of the deadline–no, 100,000 guesses–any iteration of this I would’ve missed. We all would have.

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