This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
Thirteen years ago—though it feels like roughly a million—Facebook was preparing to go public, and the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, penned a letter to investors. In it, he detailed the five core values of the company he had founded, including one headed Move Fast:
We have a saying: 'Move fast and break things.' The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.
The problem, as Zuckerberg once told a college class, was that people are “just too careful.” It’s better, he said, to just make things happen without asking permission. And if you have to apologize? If you have to fix things? Well, you can always worry about that later.
II.
More than a decade before that quote became the seminal mantra of this dystopian era—around the time Zuckerberg invented Facebook in his Harvard dorm room—a young man named Nico Harrison landed a job as a field rep for Nike, working with young athletes who would eventually become superstars. Harrison, by all accounts, was an exemplary young man who had played basketball at West Point for a year before transferring to Montana State to finish his career.
“I don’t mind hard work,” Harrison told a reporter in 1996, “but I don’t like someone always being able to tell me what to do.”
In 2021, Nico Harrison quietly left Nike to become the general manager of the Dallas Mavericks of the NBA. And in 2025, entirely out of left field, he completed one of the most stunning trades in modern sports history, sending a 25-year-old superstar named Luka Doncic to the Lakers for an oft-injured 31-year-old named Anthony Davis.
In a league whose primary engine is now off-court gossip and social-media chatter, this was the equivalent of setting off an atomic bomb. Since this trade was completed, the NBA chatterati have mostly endeavored to understand what exactly Harrison was thinking in letting go of one of the league’s best players while that player was so clearly in his prime. Conspiracy theories abounded, because that is the culture we live in, but the answer appears to be that Harrison and the management of the Mavericks just kind of had a feeling, and they acted on that feeling instead of thinking a little more on that feeling before making a decision. Harrison didn’t want to sit back and wait anymore; he felt he was better off moving fast and breaking things rather than standing still.
“So the easiest thing for me to do is do nothing, and everyone would praise me for doing nothing,” Harrison told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon. “But we really believe in it -- and time will tell if I'm right.”
III.
Look, I am not going to pretend that I am some kind of expert on the internal motivations of Nico Harrison. I am not going to pretend that I am an expert on the mechanics of NBA trades, either, given that most of my league consumption these days consists of watching the Warriors flounder through their own mediocrity. In fact, it took me several days to fully comprehend the impact of this trade, and to recognize why everyone seemed so bent out of shape about it. Sometimes, young stars do tend to burn out and fade away; maybe the Mavericks saw Doncic was somehow on an unsustainable path over the course of the next five or 10 years, and didn’t want to stake their future on him. Maybe, as Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont said, Doncic somehow wasn’t working hard enough to get into elite shape.
All that, while unlikely, might actually prove to be true (even if it remains vexing that the Mavericks seemed to get very little in return for a player of Doncic’s caliber). But I think the reason this trade captured so many people’s ire is because it also felt as if it embodied something larger, something that went far beyond the NBA, and far beyond sports. Over the course of that 10 or 15 years since the techbros like Zuckerberg became the dominant authority figures in America, we have become increasingly numb to their ethos. We are now governed by those who are so determined that they know better than the rest of us that they regularly break shit for no other reason except to rebuild it in their own megalomaniacal image.
IV.
In advance of the Mavericks’ first game without Doncic, fans protested outside of the team’s arena, which might have seemed like a silly thing to protest given that the nation is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. But I think, in a way, it’s all of a piece. In the midst of justifying the Doncic trade, Dumont, the Mavericks owner, said something telling. After essentially comparing Doncic unfavorably to the work ethic of past superstars like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan—who may have been relentless, but were often megalomaniacal, as well— he declared, “If you want to take a vacation, don’t do it with us.”
(Loose translation: We work harder and we know better, because we are rich and powerful and we own big things.)
“They’ve asked the fans for trust, as each new detail painted the organization in a worse light,” wrote D Magazine’s Matt Goodman. “Never mind that the enduring image of last year’s Finals run was an injured Dončić mummifying his midsection in athletic tape in order to take the floor. He apologized for nothing. Dumont and Harrison are shorting one of the league’s three best players.”
V.
All that made me think back to this fascinating and depressing conversation between tech journalist Kara Swisher and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, which explored—among other things—the idea that tech moguls like Elon Musk had gestated their ideals in a culture that allowed them to believe that they were smarter and more hard-working and more willing to move fast and break things than the rest of us. They didn’t just presume they knew a lot about one thing; they now presume they know a lot about everything, enough to unravel the central threads of democracy and re-order them in their own image. “Everyone’s like: Oh, they want to reform (government),” Swisher said. “I go: No, no, no, they want to burn it down and start again.”
I think in the case of the Doncic trade, that idea played out in miniature. The braintrust of the Mavericks decided unilaterally that they were better off burning down everything and starting again. They decided that doing nothing was worse than taking a battering ram to everything, and they don’t care what outsiders think because they exist in a bubble of their own making and are now utterly convinced of their own rectitude to the point that they won’t brook any dissent. And outside of basketball, this is the precipice we currently stand on: We are being asked to put our faith in people who have done nothing to earn our trust, who have often made our lives worse, and who are unwilling to apologize for all they’ve done, over the course of the past decade, to break our entire society to pieces.
This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.
“All of a piece” would be what I would call my sports newsletter, I’m incapable of seeing sports as disconnected from politics and reality. Really well done here.
And to half the country or better we stand in utter disbelief that this was actually voted 🗳️ for! What a shambles! Shit! 💩