Stuart E. Burt II

“Loyalty Never Fades” & “Mavs Fan For Life” How the mantra of a community for the last 27 years was murdered in its sleep: The Dallas Mavericks were never just a sports team. They never felt like a “Big Market Team” even when they technically were. The franchise was built on loyalty, respect, and an owner who once treated the players and fans as if they were family. There was a time when @mcuban wasn’t just the owner or a figurehead, but a hardcore fan who poured his passion into this organization. Recently Cuban sold the team, not because he was in financial trouble, or because he couldn’t afford to keep running the team. He sold it to be greedy and guised it under the idea of “easing the pressure on his kids”. He sold the Mavericks to partner with the Adelsons and get his hand in the cookie jar of real estate development and casinos. He simultaneously sold his soul to the Democratic Party and turned into a Rachel Maddow look-alike. He relinquished GM duties to a shoe salesman in what most fans assume was a pre-meditated act that lead to the events that transpired this week. In the middle of the night the casino moguls and the shoe salesman traded away the heart and soul of a community for reasons that can’t possibly pertain to basketball. They didn’t get the best offer possible. They didn’t make any other teams aware of the dealings. They didn’t give their franchise player a warning. They didn’t give their loyal fans a chance to prepare. Instead they opted to shop him to one team for what will go down as the most embarrassing franchise altering trade in the history of sports. The slimy shoe salesman didn’t just destroy the mantras, he proceeded to leak destructive details about Luka Doncic in an effort to make himself look better. The DFW metroplex in its entirety was furious about the trade. In a Cowboys city, Luka Doncic was the face of Dallas. Not Dak Prescott, not Micah Parsons, but Luka Doncic was the most popular player in the history of this town. I’ll even put him up against the Super Bowl Dynasty Dallas Cowboys players like Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. Protests, season ticket cancellations, it was organizational suicide in every essence of the word. People saying they didn’t know the fall out when they made the deal are naive, stupid, or both. These snakes knew EXACTLY what they were doing. This morning the Charlotte Hornets got more draft capital for Mark Williams than the Mavs got for Luka Doncic. Further insult to injury. This isn’t a bump in the road but rather a generational blockade for Mavs fandom. There are kids literally in tears in homes all across DFW. There are grown men who are otherwise reasonable losing sleep over a player being traded. Sports represent hope. And once in a generation there is a player that captures the love of an entire city in ways unfathomable to most fan bases. Luka Doncic in that way was Michael Jordan, he was Kobe Bryant, he was Tom Brady. There’s one constant between those 3 iconic players… their organization NEVER abandoned them. Their city NEVER abandoned them. This is the most destructive trade to a fan base in any sport in the history of the world, not just this country. Luka Doncic being sent out isn’t just losing a player, they shipped the entire Mavs fanbase out with him. There is no more loyalty. There is no more MFFL. They destroyed an entire franchise in the dead of night… and they did it so ruthlessly that it had to be the plan all along despite the consequences.