BY HENRY ABBOTT

Luka for AD. There might already be a thousand stories about THE TRADE. By some miracle, almost none mention the story’s true protagonist: Miriam Adelson.
We introduced her in 2023 with a story that ends: “What a pity for Luka Dončić, to ply his trade as part of a business concoction fueled by an international gambling syndicate with scary friends.”
Here’s a fact pattern that is public.
Miriam Adelson heads a casino empire that derives an extraordinary amount of money from Macau. Her late husband claimed to be “the largest investor of any kind in the history of China.”
The casino empire reportedly got in trouble for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for directing a poorly documented $14 million to a consultant in its attempts to bring a Chinese Basketball Association team to play near their casino in Macau.
Like her deceased husband Sheldon, Miriam is among the planet’s biggest global political donors, especially to the Republican party and Donald Trump.
There’s not a particular track record of Miriam being interested in NBA basketball. Nevertheless, her casino company approached Mark Cuban with a price that inspired a man who had defined himself as an NBA bigwig to redefine himself.
Why the Adelsons were fascinated by the NBA is clear. You only have to look at their public statements to know that their goal is to construct a new building. Reportedly, they’ve already bought not one but two premium Dallas-area locations.
Gambling is not yet legal in Dallas, but these people who’ve given a fantastic amount of money to politicians are betting that it will become legal. At that point, they will have the capacity and control to erect a giant building that will be a casino and a stadium where the Mavericks will be the anchor tenant.
That’s the backdrop. Now think about this report from Marc Stein:
They kept the talks quiet for more than three weeks, sources said, by letting only two more parties into the circle until a trade agreement was close: New Mavericks majority owner Patrick Dumont and Lakers owner Jeanie Buss.
Miriam Adelson paid $3.5 billion for the Mavericks … and learned about the Luka trade about the same time as Shams? Is that believable? And if that’s not true, why did someone bother to tell the super scrupulous Marc Stein that?
Let’s pull at that thread and see if we can unlock the mystery of what many are calling the worst trade in NBA history.
A year ago at the MIT Sloan conference, Harvard Business School’s Deepak Malhotra asked a panel of front office executives a fascinating question: “You have owners, you have the league, any of these, you have star players on your team. Are they ever placing any constraints on what you can and can’t do that might not be so obvious?”
Miriam Adelson and Las Vegas Sands had been approved by the NBA’s board of governors a couple of months prior. Their president of basketball operations and general manager, Nico Harrison, spoke first. He opened with a joke. “Owners putting constraints?” He laughed, before continuing:
No, yeah, there’s, there’s definitely, I mean, owners will put constraints on you. They might say, hey, we don’t want to go into the tax this year for whatever reason, and that’s going to put a constraint on you, in terms of what you’re able to get done if they’re not willing to pay the tax.
And another thing could be that we’re willing to pay the tax, but we have to be good enough to pay the tax. We have to be good enough to win. And so when you’re going to make moves that will incrementally make you better, but not good enough to win, then a lot of times you’re going to say, okay, we’re gonna keep our powder dry. Wait till next year, wait till this summer before we really go all the way in.
Then Daryl Morey chimed in:
I think it might be important for people to understand how decisions are really made at pretty much most sports teams. I won’t you know, it’s not all, but there is somewhat often a perception of that there’s a lead decision maker, a Monte [McNair, Kings exec on the panel], you know, a Nico that, you know, has a team of people, but then just makes a decision, and you just go off, and it’s it’s really almost never like that. That might happen with maybe a minor move, but on any significant move, it’s more of a dialogue. It’s a conversation among all these key stakeholders, where hopefully if it’s done well and that decision making unit. There’s input from all the important people.
A little bit later, Harrison elaborated about who, in those conversations, has the loudest voice:
It rotates, it changes. It’s not always the star player, it’s not always the owner, it’s not always the coach, but it’s going to be each one of those in different periods of time. So it’s really like understanding where your organization’s at and who’s really the squeaky wheel, and who can you kind of calm down, get to neutral, and then who, if you can’t calm them down, then maybe you have to do something.
Morey had a question of his own at that point: “What do you have to do?”
Harrison: “Oh. Trade them!”
The public is in the dark about what happened in Dallas to inspire this Luka trade. Sometimes multinational, multifaceted, multijurisdictional business operations go to incredible lengths to keep the public in the dark.
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