DALLAS — Nine months ago, Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison said all that separated his team from winning an NBA championship was adding more shooting around his stars.

“It was a no-brainer for us, especially after the finals,” Harrison said last July about acquiring Klay Thompson in a sign-and-trade. “We were a Klay Thompson away, we felt.”

As recently as late December, being a Klay away didn’t seem far-fetched. The Mavericks were 19-10 with the NBA’s fourth-ranked offense and 11th-ranked defense entering their Christmas Day game against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Mavericks fans know what happened next: Luka Dončić suffered a left calf strain in that game, which set the stage for Harrison to ship him to the Los Angeles Lakers five days before the trade deadline.

Barring major moves this summer, it’s hard to feel confident in the Mavericks as contenders again any time soon. Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving played 25 minutes together before the injury bug bit. A left adductor strain Davis suffered Feb. 8 kept him out of the lineup for nearly six weeks. Then, on March 3, Irving tore the ACL in his left knee.

Along the way, there were fan ejections, multiple “Fire Nico!” chants and Harrison explaining that he did the Dončić trade because “defense wins championships” — an analysis Dončić called “sad.”

The Mavericks will have a long offseason to reflect on everything that went wrong. Friday night, the Memphis Grizzlies eliminated them in the Western Conference Play-In Tournament with a 120-106 loss.

Memphis scored at a clip of 120 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass, and racked up 60 points in the paint. Dallas’ perimeter defense and double-big starting lineup featuring Davis and Dereck Lively II was a letdown.

Davis at least had a standout game on the offensive end, scoring 40 points on 16-of-29 shooting. It was even more impressive considering that Davis was in obvious pain throughout much of the evening. With 8:12 remaining, Davis badly missed a 3-pointer from the left wing and hobbled to the Mavericks bench. A trainer tried to work out discomfort in his right calf.

Harrison watched it all intently.

Tremendous directing here going to the Nico shot after the airball/injury pic.twitter.com/cVneajSwui

— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) April 19, 2025

“I’m just very appreciative I get to play the game of basketball,” Davis told reporters after the game. “Appreciative to Dallas and the fan base and my teammates of accepting me and welcoming me with open arms, given the situation.”

Post-trade, Davis faced his former team, the Lakers, once on April 9. He scored 13 points. Dončić was the best player on the floor that night in Dallas, pouring in 45 points in an emotional homecoming. Fans cheered Dončić every time he touched the ball.

“Obviously, it’s a lot of emotion,” Davis told reporters after the season-ending loss in Memphis. “I know it’s not directed towards me. The city loved the guy.”

Anthony Davis (3), defended by Memphis’ Jaren Jackson Jr., had 40 points for the Mavericks on Friday. (Petre Thomas / Imagn Images)

Mavericks fans watched Dirk Nowitzki spend his entire 21-season career with the franchise. They believed Dončić could be a Dallas lifer, too. It was easy to imagine a future where the Mavericks tried to put the right pieces around Dončić for the next five, eight, possibly 10 years.

But Harrison took that away when he traded Dončić for the older Davis (who turned 32 in March), Max Christie (a back-end rotation player by season’s end), and a lone first-round pick.

Dončić, 26, averaged 28.9 points, 9.5 rebounds and 8.1 assists in last year’s postseason. He owns the second-highest scoring average in NBA playoff history, trailing only Michael Jordan. When asked Tuesday if the Mavericks maximized their return in a trade for such a player, Harrison answered in the affirmative.

“We got what we wanted,” Harrison said.

Harrison wanted Davis, who is arguably the most impactful defensive player in the NBA when operating at his peak. One of the obvious problems with that plan is Davis’ injury-prone history. In the Mavericks’ season finale Friday, Davis battled admirably but struggled to stay upright as the game went along. He subbed out for good at the 5:22 mark in the fourth quarter with Dallas trailing by 17.

The Mavericks’ loss made them the first team since the 2019-20 Golden State Warriors to miss the playoffs the season after a finals appearance.

In just seven months, Harrison went from saying the Mavericks were a complementary piece away from winning a championship to trading the team’s best player. Thompson, for his sake, finished with 18 points of 7-of-15 shooting in the Play-In loss, sinking four 3-pointers as the Mavericks’ second-leading scorer of the night. He averaged 14.0 points on a career-low 41.2 field goal percentage in his first season in Dallas.

The Dončić trade and the calamitous sequence of events that followed have both undeniably tarnished the team’s relationship with its fan base and worsened the Mavericks’ outlook in the short and long term. And to think that only last summer, the Mavericks were supposedly just a Klay away.

(Top photo: Jerome Miron / Imagn Images)