Welcome to Hoop Dreams, a season preview unlike any other you’ll read before the 2016-17 season tips off. The premise is simple. We’ll be providing 30 of these fictional forays because it simply stinks that only one team can win the title each year. The list of contending teams seems to shrink with each campaign, and we wanted to provide something to those fans who only get to dream of Larry O’Brien during the offseason. Before October, every team can win the NBA title. Don’t believe us? Then keep reading. – Ed
Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle called out his team after a 106-91 loss to the Houston Rockets on October 19. Citing the Mavs’ poor start, he compared his team to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“The beginning of the game was abominable,” he said. “It was a Donald Trump debate performance.”
The consensus was, of course, that Trump had lost the debate after a slow start. Perhaps Carlisle was trying to impress his boss, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. After all, Cuban had come out strongly against the Republican nominee for president a number of times in the offseason. From sitting in the front row of Trump’s first debate against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to doubling down on claims that Trump has sexually assaulted multiple women, Cuban had clearly picked a side in the election.
If Carlisle’s comments were meant to inspire, however, it didn’t work right away. The Mavs promptly went out and lost their next game, 101-75. It was a disappointing end to the preseason slate where Dallas went just 2-5. With a few days until the season began, the Dallas front office was desperate to light a fire under the proverbial horses before the games start to count.
The horses, of course, would be on the precipice of change in the 2016-17 season. The landscape of the NBA’s Western Conference had changed tremendously over the summer. The best team in the NBA somehow didn’t win the NBA title. In the ensuing arms race, Dallas — and the rest of the league — had fallen behind.
With longtime Mavericks centerpiece Dirk Nowitzki entering his 19th and possibly final season, Mavs general manager Donnie Nelson looked to bring some youth into the fold. Dallas signed Harrison Barnes to a max deal, a 4-year, $94 million contract that was a direct result of Kevin Durant choosing Golden State. One of the NBA’s best players joining the best regular season team of all time made Barnes’ 11.7 points per game expendable. Dallas was more than happy to take the young forward off the market.
Barnes, however, struggled in the preseason. Some in Dallas were already wondering if the 24-year-old was a poor choice for a max contract. But an idea struck Mark Cuban one day when he scouring the internet looking for more ways to tamper with the democratic process. What if he could combine his two favorite things: owning an NBA Team and brutally owning Donald Trump at every possible opportunity?
At an all-hands-on-deck team meeting before the season began, Cuban took a makeshift stage at center court of American Airlines Arena in Dallas and held out his phone.
“Basketball is important,” Cuban reportedly said. “Winning is important. But what’s winning worth if you don’t get in some spectacular burns along the way?”
The assembled Mavericks were confused. But Cuban made every Mavericks employee get out their phone and download Dust, an app Cuban himself invests in. In an unprecedented move toward #brand synergy, the players, coaches and other team employees complied.
Dirk Nowitzki was reportedly one of the first to pull out his phone to download Dust, a confusing but secure text messaging application that provides end-to-end encryption for messages that can be set to delete forever after a set period of time. But it was 30-year-old Mavericks center Salah Mejri who, months later, had revealed to the media what Cuban had in mind.
“He wanted us to, uh, make fun of Donald Trump I guess” the 7-foot-2 Mejri finally revealed in late July during a championship celebration in his hometown of Jenduba, Tunisia. “I don’t really know why.”
Cuban gave every person in attendance Donald Trump’s Dust contact information. No one knew how he got it, or why Trump would use a secure messaging application that doesn’t have enough reviews to have a rating in iTunes. In fact, few knew how the app worked in the first place.
“The user interface was really tough to get used to, which made it difficult for a lot of us,” Mavericks center Andrew Bogut said later. “We really hoped they would streamline the notifications system and perhaps give us a few more options with the Blast functionality.”
Dallas lost their first six games of the regular season as they struggled to understand how to securely send multimedia messages in an effectively scathing manner. According to an exhaustive search of Trump’s Twitter timeline from early October, no one was able to draw his attention away from the 2016 presidential election.
Cuban called a team meeting after their disappointing start. He was reportedly furious that, outside of his own well-established feud, no true beef had been started with Donald Trump by anyone else on the Mavs. According to high-ranking officials in the organization, Cuban made it clear: annoy the tan man at all costs. Make fun of his expensive but ill-fitting suits. Rankle him in any way possible. It’s the only way for Dallas to turn their season around.
“We really needed to work on our offensive rebounds and focus on adhering to coach Carlisle’s system,” shooting guard Seth Curry said. “But we were spending so much time trying to log into Dust with our Facebook accounts that we couldn’t really work out the kinks in practice.”
Cuban’s high hopes for the strategy began and ended with Barnes, who continued to struggle into late November as the Mavs hovered just below the .500 mark. His woes began in the late stages of the postseason with Golden State, where he lost his jumper on open looks and soon lost minutes as the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. Though he made the United States Olympic team, he averaged just 7.8 minutes of court time, the lowest on the team, and only played in half of Team USA’s eight games in route to gold.
Then, after a November 25 loss to the world champion Cleveland Cavaliers, a frustrated Barnes finally had enough. He opened Dust on his iPhone and stared at Trump’s contact info. Over the summer, Barnes was the victim of Knicks point guard Brandon Jennings’ series of tweets about his lack of playing time with Team USA. By now he knew how to take digital abuse, but could he dish it out? With the curser blinking on a blank message window, it was now or never.
“I … never really enjoyed The Apprentice,” Barnes tentatively typed out with a pointer finger. He paused, wondering if that would be enough. He closed his eyes and sent the message, then plugged in his phone and went to bed. He had no idea what he’d done.
At 3:08 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, @realDonaldTrump sent out a series of 16 tweets about Harrison Barnes. Trump first tried taking a screenshot of the message, but Dust doesn’t allow identifying information to show up in screenshots. Instead, Trump ranted about The Apprentice’s Emmy nominations and accurately pointed out that Barnes had a career-low PER with the Mavs during the 2016 season.
Two nights later, Barnes had 40 points and 20 rebounds in a 31-point win over the New Orleans Pelicans. Cuban was thrilled. Barnes still drew the ire of Trump for the next month, the 70-year-old man gleefully tweeting after every Mavericks loss. He called Barnes a “lightweight” and said the team’s coordinated attacks on the billionaire were “sad!” But after Christmas, the losses were few and far between.
Other Mavericks joined the budding superstar in using their cell phone to send random owns to Donald J. Trump. Quincy Acy “Dusted” Trump about his uneven understanding of U.S. foreign policy every morning while he completed the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen. Dorian Finney-Smith posted a picture of a bowl of Cheetos that appeared to be scowling to his Instagram account after every Mavericks win. Even Nowitzki reportedly sent a Dust message of the emoji with a hand rubbing its chin to Trump after the Mavs reached five games above .500 in early January.
Deron Williams got creative, mimicking Trump’s unique social media style to litter the billionaire’s iPhone with strange non-sequiturs about stamina and post-workout recovery gels. His imaginative punctuation, however, actually drew praise from Trump, who thought his emulation was a respectful counter-protest on a team full of “thugs.”
(Williams barely saw the floor as the season went on and was left off the postseason roster for undisclosed reasons.)
Trump supporters and Pelicans fans tried to fight back against the Mavs. But not even a Pepe the Frog counter-attack meme could slow Dallas’s social media surge, nor their resulting successes on the court. With Dallas in first place in the Southwest division in late March, a low-level employee working in the Mavericks ticket office tweeted a “u mad?” meme into Trump’s mentions using her private Twitter account.
Trump manually retweeted the mention and threatened to sue @mavsboiiii69420 for $3 billion dollars.
Cuban promised to cover any legal bills for anyone sued by Trump for any reason whatsoever. The epic burns continued unabated.
The spring of 2017 will long be remembered for two things: a 16-game sweep through the playoffs by the Dallas Mavericks and their source of seemingly-unlimited power: vaguely smack-talking an old white man with poor taste in graphic design.
Barnes scored 45 points and picked up 19 rebounds and 12 assists in the title-clinching Game 4 win, the 14th triple-double of his remarkable playoff run. In addition to being named the league’s second-ever unanimous MVP in the regular season, he was named Hater of the Year by Everyone Online.
Months earlier, Donald Trump had called the 24-year-old a “total loser” to his 12.7 million followers on Twitter. But by June, he was wrong. Barnes and the Mavericks were NBA champions. And it was all Trump’s fault.
