President Donald Trump used a two-hour speech at the Texas GOP midterm convention on Wednesday to weigh in on one of the most debated moves in recent NBA history: the Dallas Mavericks’ 2025 decision to trade Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Speaking from the stage at the American Airlines Center — the Mavericks’ home arena and the same building hosting the convention — Trump said the deal simply didn’t make sense to him, according to an account of the remarks published by Breitbart.
“I must tell you, I don’t understand the trade. That trade is not good,” the president said.
He then floated the idea of a do-over, joking: “Maybe we could redo that trade. I redo deals all the time. … I understand deals. But that one, I didn’t quite get.”
The line landed as a quip rather than a policy proposal, but it underscored how thoroughly the Dončić trade has become a reference point in sports conversation — one that has now crossed into political territory.
The trade that stunned the league
The Mavericks sent Dončić to the Lakers in 2025, a move that shocked the NBA world at the time and has remained a frequent topic of fan frustration since.
The context is what made the decision so difficult to process. Dončić had just helped lead the Mavericks to the 2024 NBA Finals before he was shipped out, a detail the New York Post highlighted in its coverage.
The mechanics of the deal added another layer of controversy. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison negotiated it with the Lakers’ Rob Pelinka so quietly that no other team in the league knew Dallas was even making Dončić available, according to the reporting.
That silence meant there was no bidding war, no chance for rival franchises to assemble competing offers, and no soft landing for a fan base still processing the loss of a franchise cornerstone. It is a sequence of events that has fueled scrutiny of the Mavericks’ front office ever since.
A recurring theme in Dallas
For Trump, the venue itself seemed to sharpen the point. Dončić played in the very arena where the president was speaking, making the trade a local grievance as much as a national sports debate.
His remarks also fit a familiar rhetorical pattern — the dealmaker assessing other people’s deals. Trump has long framed his public identity around dealmaking, and he leaned into that framing again Wednesday, suggesting the Mavericks’ move was one of the rare transactions he couldn’t parse.
Whether the comment amounts to anything more than a memorable line remains to be seen. No mechanism exists for a president to reverse an NBA trade, and nothing in Trump’s remarks suggested he was pursuing one.
Still, the moment captured something about the trade’s staying power. Nearly a year and a half after it happened, the Dončić deal is still capable of generating headlines — now with a presidential seal of disapproval attached.
The Mavericks have not publicly responded to the president’s comments.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2026/09/10/we-got-to-redo-that-deal-trump-roasts-dallas-mavericks-for-luka-doncic-trade/