Report: Mavericks Lied About Luka Doncic's "Injury" Absence

We're all still trying to get to the bottom of why the Dallas Mavericks traded superstar Luka Doncic to the LA Lakers. There have been a number of reports, and many of them have centered on the Mavs' view of Luka's "conditioning."

Now comes a report that Dallas even went so far as to lie about Doncic's "injury" status during a five-game absence earlier in the season.

According to C. Clark, M. Vorkunov and F. Katz in The Athletic, what the Mavs put out there about Luka being out of the lineup was not altogether transparent:

In November, Dončić missed five games with what the Mavericks announced as a right wrist sprain. That injury classification was not entirely true. In reality, Dončić was supposed to use time off to improve his conditioning, team sources said.

Dallas certainly had some concerns about the way Doncic kept his body prepared for NBA action, but the fact is, until this season, he'd never missed a significant amount of time due to injury. In fact, as the trio of writers note, this will be his first season in seven years in the league playing fewer than 60 games.

Anthony Davis, on the other hand, who the Mavs acquired in exchange for Doncic, hasn't been able to stay healthy much at all. He's only had two seasons in the last seven (including this one) in which he has been able to play as many as 60 games.

And as we all know, he went down in his very first game with Dallas, and is out for at least a month.

As for Doncic, the report adds that the Mavericks had no intention of ever offering him the five-year, $345 million contract he would have been eligible for this coming summer, reportedly over those same conditioning concerns. So Mavs GM Nico Harrison got out in front of it.

We'll see how this all plays out, and how much each of the central figures in this deal actually play for their new teams.