The Dallas Mavericks have had an eventful month, to say the least, as they traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers in the middle of the night for Anthony Davis, and have been dealing with intense fan backlash ever since.
We have seen Mavs fans protest outside the arena — some literally brought a coffin with a Mavs logo on it — and some have gotten kicked out from in the arena for calling for GM Nico Harrison to be fired. Making matters even worse is that after citing conditioning concerns as the main reason for not wanting to pay Luka long-term and insisting this was a win-now move, Davis got hurt in his very first game as a Mav and they are just trying to tread water in the 8-seed currently.
For the good folks in the Mavs organization trying their best to do their jobs regarding ticket sales, in-game presentation, and marketing, the last few weeks have been a nightmare, and that was incredibly evident when the team released a new hype video and theme song with Dallas artist Dorrough. The video, clearly shot well in advance of the trade, had to then be edited to include clips from Davis’ one game in a Mavs uniform and edit out any images of Doncic. The problem there is, as it turns out, Luka has supplied a lot of Mavs highlights and appears on the floor in even more.
The result is, towards the end of the video below, one of the funniest edits you will ever see as they just completely black out Doncic and put a big Mavs logo over his head.
To their credit, they try to do this at other points with other players in the video to make it seem like it was an artistic choice, but there was very clearly was a strong effort not to show Doncic (there’s another time they do it with him on the bench). The first time I watched it I genuinely laughed out loud because I had been told it was funny but was not expecting how egregious it was. Salute to the Mavs video team, though, this is not their fault and they’re just trying to make lemonade right now.