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It's been one year since Nico Harrison, Patrick Dumont and the Dallas Mavericks sent shockwaves through the sports world by trading Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Since then, and even after the Mavericks miraculously won the draft lottery last summer, it hasn't gotten any easier to find any logical explanation for the deal.
So, instead of diving down that rabbit hole again, Bleacher Report decided to analyze the swap through a different lens. We want to put it in context among the very worst trades in NBA history—the 50 worst, in fact.
To help compile and rank those deals, we concocted a new metric aptly called LUKA, which is short for "Lost Utility" and "Known Aftermath."
To find the LUKA for a given trade, we first found "Lost Utility" (or LU), which is the difference between the outgoing and incoming wins over replacement player ("WORP"). That number came from a five-year window enveloping the trade. Counting some from both before and after the deal allows the exercise to sort of contemplate how people felt at the time it happened (because we had an idea of what kind of player was heading out or in) and how they felt with some hindsight.
There's a reason for limiting the window to five years, too. It's impossible to know how long a given player will stay in a situation. For example, if the Charlotte Hornets hadn't traded Kobe Bryant to the Los Angeles Lakers, there's no way to guarantee he would've played for two decades there.
Of course, the five-year window doesn't exist for every player involved. In the case of players who were out of the league before the window closed, the count was cut off by the end of their last season.
For players who were dealt just ahead of their rookie years or were traded as picks long before they entered the NBA, the window was the first four years of their careers (a standard, modern rookie contract).
Now, for the "Known Aftermath" (or KA) half of the metric, points were tallied for each player for All-Star appearances (five points) and All-NBA nods (10) within the five-year window, plus MVP wins (15) or Finals MVP wins (20) at any time after the trade. The decision to extend that window on the latter two accolades was made because talents who reach that level are generally good enough to win those awards wherever they wind up.
And finally, once you have the LU (incoming WORP minus outgoing WORP) and KA (incoming accolade points minus outgoing accolade points) calculated, you average the two for the final LUKA.
After ironing out the process, we applied it to a whopping sample of 60 of the most notable and talked-about trades in NBA history. We looked at (surprise, surprise) the Luka-to-L.A. trade. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander going to the Oklahoma City Thunder was in the mix. Deals involving Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and other legends were analyzed, too.
But because there isn't a single metric that can truly and fully account for the context behind these deals, we also gave fans a big say in the final order.
All 60 of the aforementioned trades were uploaded to a survey that generated random, either/ors. Two of the trades pop up on the screen under a simple question: Which trade was worse? The more clicks a deal got in that exercise, the higher it climbed the list.
After thousands of votes were cast, the results were lined up with the LUKA scores (with some extra weight given to the fans' view), a top 50 came together and a runoff vote between the top five was held on the B/R app to get the final order.
It's been one year since Nico Harrison, Patrick Dumont and the Dallas Mavericks sent shockwaves through the sports world by trading Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Since then, and even after the Mavericks miraculously won the draft lottery last summer, it hasn't gotten any easier to find any logical explanation for the deal.
So, instead of diving down that rabbit hole again, Bleacher Report decided to analyze the swap through a different lens. We want to put it in context among the very worst trades in NBA history—the 50 worst, in fact.
To help compile and rank those deals, we concocted a new metric aptly called LUKA, which is short for "Lost Utility" and "Known Aftermath."
To find the LUKA for a given trade, we first found "Lost Utility" (or LU), which is the difference between the outgoing and incoming wins over replacement player ("WORP"). That number came from a five-year window enveloping the trade. Counting some from both before and after the deal allows the exercise to sort of contemplate how people felt at the time it happened (because we had an idea of what kind of player was heading out or in) and how they felt with some hindsight.
There's a reason for limiting the window to five years, too. It's impossible to know how long a given player will stay in a situation. For example, if the Charlotte Hornets hadn't traded Kobe Bryant to the Los Angeles Lakers, there's no way to guarantee he would've played for two decades there.
Of course, the five-year window doesn't exist for every player involved. In the case of players who were out of the league before the window closed, the count was cut off by the end of their last season.
For players who were dealt just ahead of their rookie years or were traded as picks long before they entered the NBA, the window was the first four years of their careers (a standard, modern rookie contract).
Now, for the "Known Aftermath" (or KA) half of the metric, points were tallied for each player for All-Star appearances (five points) and All-NBA nods (10) within the five-year window, plus MVP wins (15) or Finals MVP wins (20) at any time after the trade. The decision to extend that window on the latter two accolades was made because talents who reach that level are generally good enough to win those awards wherever they wind up.
And finally, once you have the LU (incoming WORP minus outgoing WORP) and KA (incoming accolade points minus outgoing accolade points) calculated, you average the two for the final LUKA.
After ironing out the process, we applied it to a whopping sample of 60 of the most notable and talked-about trades in NBA history. We looked at (surprise, surprise) the Luka-to-L.A. trade. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander going to the Oklahoma City Thunder was in the mix. Deals involving Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and other legends were analyzed, too.
But because there isn't a single metric that can truly and fully account for the context behind these deals, we also gave fans a big say in the final order.
All 60 of the aforementioned trades were uploaded to a survey that generated random, either/ors. Two of the trades pop up on the screen under a simple question: Which trade was worse? The more clicks a deal got in that exercise, the higher it climbed the list.
After thousands of votes were cast, the results were lined up with the LUKA scores (with some extra weight given to the fans' view), a top 50 came together and a runoff vote between the top five was held on the B/R app to get the final order.
