Are the Dallas Mavericks the worst franchise in all of sport?

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There is a special sort of madness that overcomes any group of people when they’ve booked a meeting space for the afternoon. Now that you’re all trapped in this room with your colleagues/competitors, you feel compelled to come up with a couple of Very Big Ideas. ‘There are no bad questions’. ‘Nobody’s keeping score’. Those sorts of lies.

As you work your way around the table, ginning each other into a frenzy of stupidity, the most self-destructive proposals begin to sound not only doable, but absolutely necessary.

I assume this is how most wars start, as well as how the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic.

One month after Dallas made that deal – sending a transcendent 25-year-old superstar to the L.A. Lakers in return for a large, not very bendable man who would injure himself in his first game – the verdict is already in. Guilty on all counts.

Guilty of making Dallas much worse. Guilty of making the Lakers much better. Guilty of turning your own fans feral. Guilty of repeatedly trying to make a transparently awful decision sound reasonable. Most of all – guilty of not getting it.

This week, the Mavericks announced that ticket prices are going up. And not just a little – an average of nine per cent (I can picture some bright bulb in marketing sticking their hand up and going, ‘It should be fine as long as we avoid double digits.’).

Instead of just sticking it to their customers, the Mavericks felt the need to offer a rationale. They need the money for “ongoing investments in the team and fan engagement.”

This is the kind of meaningless nonsense people say to each other in meetings, not in the real world. Dallas no longer knows the difference between its meeting-space voice and its outside voice.

On Tuesday, they found out that star guard Kyrie Irving is gone for the year with an ACL tear. When you’ve screwed up everything else, you get blamed for bad luck, too.

It had already been decided that the Doncic trade was the worst in a long time. If the Lakers win a title, it could become the worst in NBA history. If Doncic wins two or three titles, it’s Babe Ruth to the Yankees for cash considerations.

But now you’re starting to wonder if it’s even better than that. Is it possible that the Dallas Mavericks are not only the worst traders, but also the worst franchise in sport? Could we have actually spotted one of that endangered species?

One of the things we’re losing in sports is the dumb factor. The rise of metrics and the wonks who deploy them has made everyone sensitive to big mistakes.

Mistakes used to be a fun part of it. A great general manager or team president was by definition a wild man. He didn’t move pieces around the board in an orderly fashion. He gambled. The bigger the risk, the greater the reward. The only measure of it was titles. If you won them, you were smart. If you didn’t, you weren’t. End of.

Now everyone aspires to become a master of the hedge. Small, incremental gains is the order of business. It does not seem a coincidence to me that the rise of the far-sighted amateur investor coincides with the decline of a bet-the-house ethos in sports.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are an example par excellence. Over the past decade, the Leafs have taken zero risks in the market.

They rode the index down when that’s when everyone said it was what they should do. They drafted the people everyone told them to draft. They stuck with those investments despite marginal returns. On the back end, they earn a packet in ticketing and TV dividends. They put nothing on the line, win nothing and are a model franchise.

Even the people who love the Leafs hate them, but there is no specifically stupid thing that anyone can point at and laugh. This is unlike the regimes of the past. Let’s face it – Harold Ballard was ridiculous, but he was exciting. Would you call the current Leafs exciting? Or any other franchise in the league?

It’s not that they make the right decisions. It’s that they only make the obvious ones. The result is profit, stability and boredom.

Boring is good when you’re planning for retirement, less so when you’re staging mass entertainment.

Consistently boring decision making is only possible in a constant growth environment. If you’re going to make more money next year than you made this year whether or not you win, there isn’t just an absence of pressure to take chances. There is pressure to never take a chance again.

We’re about to go through another dreary NHL trade deadline. Let me guess – nothing crazy happens. Nobody takes a really big swing. Why would they?

The most important thing that will happen during this NHL season has already gone down. The league announced that the salary cap is going up substantially for the next three years. That means everyone’s making more money.

So we already know which hockey team wins – all of them. The same is true in every league everywhere. Things are moving up across the board.

Someone willing to risk doing something stupid in those circumstances is more than an outlier. They are a direct line to an ancient culture. They should be celebrated.

Without them, the league you follow becomes more like the S&P Index each season. No surprises, please.

Dallas surprised the sports world just once and people have not shut up about it for an entire month. What does that tell you about what the sports fan actually wants? It’s something to talk about that isn’t real life.

In the coming period of global retraction that now seems inevitable, sports may stop growing at pace. Teams could need to do more than show up every second or third day to attract customers.

That’s good news for the noninvestor. More uncertainty means more meetings means more showing off means more terrible decisions means more things to talk about. In the end, it’s not the wins that people come back for. It’s the stories. The more unbelievable, the better.