Friday, Feb 21, 2025 • Cristal Gonzalez : contact

For me, being a Dallas sports fan energizes my research and my work in the classroom. I was born in Dallas, grew up in Arlington and have been a sports fan for as long as I can remember. When I was 6 years old, I sat in the upper deck at Arlington Stadium the night Nolan Ryan got his lip split open by a Bo Jackson ground ball. With the Mavs, I go back to the “Three Js” (Jason Kidd, Jamal Mashburn and Jim Jackson). Being a Dallas sports fan has been such an important part of my life and foundational to relationships with some of my closest friends and family. As a scholar, I bring it all with me. I never saw value in leaving my fandom at the door. Being a fan drives my curiosity about research into sports culture, and being a fan helps me understand the fan-franchise bond in ways that I bring into the classroom.

Now, on to the Dončić trade. Mavs fans are deep in their feelings, maneuvering through the various stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining and depression. It doesn’t seem many have found acceptance yet, the final stage of the grieving process. As for the franchise, I guarantee other pro franchises are intently watching the unfolding aftermath of the trade, from the organization’s comments criticizing  Dončić ’s physical condition and commitment, which only seemed to anger fans more; to the ejection of fans in the arena for voicing their displeasure or displaying signs like “Fire Nico,” directed at Mavs general manager Nico Harrison; to monetary effects, such as the impact on season ticket and suite sales, advertising and sponsorships and merchandise sales. Fans have agency in this conversation. They are the paying customers and drive the bottom line. So other franchises are watching this—the organization’s response—and evaluating the level of fan backlash. Will time heal this wound or will fans pull back their loyalty in ways such as no longer attending games, not purchasing the team’s streaming channel—or cancelling their subscription—and not buying team merchandise?

Mark Cuban was the majority owner of the Mavs from 2000 to 2023. He often said that while he is the owner, “really all of North Texas” owns the Mavericks. How does this idea of shared ownership factor into the fan reaction, and does this trade mark a significant breach of trust between the franchise and its community?

The new Mavs ownership group is led by Miriam Adelson—the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the former CEO and chairman of casino company Las Vegas Sands—and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont, who replaced Cuban as the franchise’s governor and approved the trade. Since Adelson and Dumont have assumed control, it appears that they have treated the purchase of the franchise as purely a business interest. In contrast, Cuban always seemed like he was one of the fans. He literally became a “Mavs Fan For Life” before coining the term after purchasing the floundering franchise in 2000. He sat in the crowd with us, he made himself available to the media through success and in failure and he made Mavs fans believe that he was always formulating the next big trade and working to make the team, and the fan experience, the best it could be. And his emotions, win or lose, mirrored those of the fans. Why Cuban sold the team to this particular group is an entirely different conversation. But, reading news reports about how he tried to convince Dumont at the 11th hour not to do the deal, it’s reasonable to think that if Cuban were still majority owner, or if he had sold to a different group, Dončić would likely still be playing in Dallas.

From my perspective as a literary scholar, people like Dončić, Dirk Nowitzki, and Cuban had built a lot of narrative history, goodwill that truly made the Mavs feel like they belonged to the city. And like people will do with characters in books, movies and television shows, fans become emotionally and financially invested. They start to see sports figures as larger-than-life, happy distractions from the “real world” and even as vehicles of hope. Which, it seems, for many Mavs fans has been stripped away by the unexpectedness of the trade. When those revered figures move on, it’s natural for fans to experience a kind of identity crisis. For instance, Mavs fans might find themselves questioning their allegiance—are they Mavs fans or Dončić fans? Can they be Dončić fans while playing for a hated conference rival? As a result, fans can feel confused and directionless, and their search for meaning can inspire them to express themselves, whether through art or protest or just having emotional conversations with one another.

You are president of the Sport Literature Association (SLA), an international organization devoted to the study of sport in literature and culture. Has this trade been a topic of conversation among SLA members and perhaps the European press? Has analysis there reflected the shock and disbelief by fans and the media here? Is there precedent in other professional sports clubs trading off their beloved young superstar?

In the U.S., similar instances that come to mind are the Baltimore Colts moving to Indianapolis under the cover of night, Jerry Jones firing Tom Landry on his first day as owner of the Cowboys, the Boston Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the rival Yankees and perhaps most similarly to the Dončić deal, the Edmonton Oilers trading Wayne Gretzky in 1988 to the Los Angeles Kings.

But the Dončić trade has reverberated around the globe. A colleague in Canada who is a longtime Oilers fan told me that even today, fans talk with disbelief and anger about the Gretzky trade. Fans know exactly where they were the day Gretzky got traded—in the days before alerts hit our smartphones and social media lit up with thousands of takes. They still use the term “villain”—a literary concept—to describe then-Oilers owner Peter Pocklington, who traded Gretzky, then age 30 and fresh off winning four Stanley Cups, due to rising salaries in the NHL. A substantial faction of that fan base has never relinquished its anger over that trade, even four decades later. Talk about a teaching moment for the current Mavs ownership.

An Australian colleague, who happens to be a Lakers fan, was, obviously, thrilled about the trade and believes Lakers fans will form a similar bond with Dončić like Mavs fans did. That’s a hard pill for Mavs fans to swallow.

Another colleague based in England has followed the NBA for 20 years and said he’s never spent more time pondering a trade: “What we’ve seen here is a team doing away with decades of consensus on how a team should be built, so … it’s normal [for fans] to feel a little rattled.” He also said that theories being talked about in the U.S. on sports shows and articles have found a global audience—specifically ones that suggest Adelson-Dumont purchased the Mavs as part of their yearslong efforts to lobby the Texas legislature to legalize gambling in the state.

How might the new ownership start to repair the fissures within the fan base and what opportunities are there for the team to win fans back without a young, generational star to keep hope alive season after season?

I think Dallas sports fans are forgiving as a community. People want to go to games, they want to engage in water-cooler conversations at the office and have barstool debates with other fans. They want to listen to sports talk radio, scroll through social media and do all the things that go into devoutly following a team. But this trade does seem to have the potential to alter the franchise-fan relationship. We’ve already seen the team give refunds to fans no longer interested in their season tickets. Additionally, it was reported earlier this month that since the trade, the franchise has actually increased the price of season tickets by as much as 61%. I think Dallas fans are going to look back on this as a watershed event in our sports cultural history, and the next steps ownership takes will be critical to either beginning to repair the fan relationship or potentially fraying it further. But again, I think Dallas sports fans have a forgiving nature. They want reconciliation and a show of contrition from ownership. If the Mavericks ownership wants to hasten the healing process and extend an olive branch to fans, it needs to acknowledge the shared pain felt by a fan base shocked by the suddenness of a trade and increasingly wary that ownership does not put fans—again, the paying customer—at the top of its priority list.

Literally thousands of fans wore Dončić’s No. 77 jersey to Mavs home games. When the Lakers come to Dallas for the first time in April, is it possible that some Mavs fans will show up at American Airlines Center in a No. 77 Lakers jerseys? Absolutely. In January, the NBA released its top-selling jerseys and Dončić’s Mavs jersey ranked No. 8. For some fans, they will have to sort out their emotions and decide if they can be both a Mavs fan and a Dončić fan. Some fans might never come back to the same level of commitment they had before the trade. It certainly will be interesting to see where Dončić’s Lakers jersey will rank when the league releases its next sales report. I do think that in Dallas-Fort Worth you will see a fair share of yellow-and-gold Dončić jerseys popping up. And that’s something I never thought I would see.