A Memorable Night at the Office

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — The Trail Blazers’ 127-108 win over the Phoenix Suns, their seventh victory in their last eight games, was the only NBA game on in the late window on Saturday.

Surely, nothing else of consequence happened in the league during those two and a half hours, right?

Surely, the takeaway from the night would be Deandre Ayton’s dominant 24-point performance against his former team, Jerami Grant’s best defensive game in weeks, another excellent game for both Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe off the bench, and the thought that the Blazers might just be a good basketball team now, right?

Surely, there wouldn’t be a tweet that upended the entire NBA during the closing minutes of a blowout, right?

Here’s how the end of the night unfolded.

With just under five minutes left in the game, and the Blazers having the victory more or less wrapped up, Suns head coach Mike Budenholzer pulled his starters. Around that same time, ESPN insider Shams Charania’s account on “X, The Everything App” posted this:

Just like everyone else who does this professionally—as well as most of you, probably—I have push notifications turned on for Charania’s tweets, to make sure I don’t get tricked by a fake account. It’s more important than ever this time of year, just before the trade deadline. That goes double for this time period, when the owner of that app has made it so that anyone can buy a blue checkmark and very easily impersonate a reporter. You have to be careful.

So that notification flashes across my phone, and slowly, everyone else on press row sees it, too. The immediate reaction is that Charania’s account was hacked. There’s just no way the Mavericks would trade Luka Doncic unless he demanded it, and there hadn’t been so much as a whisper of that in a climate where star discontent gets manufactured routinely by the league’s TV partners to fill a news cycle. 25-year-old MVP candidates don’t get traded midseason coming off a Finals appearance. It didn’t add up.

As far as hacks go, this was more convincing than the time someone hacked Adrian Wojnarowski’s account a year ago to push an NBA Top Shot-related phishing scam, three full years after that was a thing people cared about. If I were hacking one of the newsbreakers’ accounts, I’d probably also use it to tweet something outrageous like a made-up Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis trade and break NBA Twitter.

And then, after a few minutes, the realization set in that this wasn’t a joke. The main ESPN account posted it, and the Los Angeles Times’ Dan Woike confirmed it.

Slowly, word circulated around the Moda Center of what was happening. It didn’t take until the end of the game for it to make its way onto the court, either. With just over two minutes to go, Suns guard Damion Lee wandered over to the sideline during a pause between free throws. A fan got his attention and showed him their phone.

Lee quickly walked back to the court and said something to referee Zach Zarba, who shrugged. Lee then went around to the Blazers and Suns players who were on the court, and then over to Portland’s bench, to deliver the news.

“A minute or so before that, some of the coaches behind the bench had started talking about it,” Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said. “I think most people are still kind of in disbelief to see a guy of his magnitude be traded right now, and to the Lakers. So the first thing you say is, ‘Luka to L.A.,’ and I’m like, ‘For who?’ And then you find out it’s A.D. It’s an interesting move for a team that went to the Finals. But we’ll see how it plays out.”

Saturday night took me back almost exactly two years, to Feb. 8, 2023, the night before the trade deadline.

The Blazers were minutes away from tipping off a game against Golden State when Josh Hart, who was scheduled to be in the starting lineup, was abruptly pulled off the floor by a team staffer as his teammates gathered around former head of security Rick Riley’s phone, showing a tweet from Wojnarowski that Hart had been traded to the Knicks.

Not that the two trades are close in magnitude, but another one that night was. After the Blazers won that game, Damian Lillard walked off the podium to leave the arena, and a similar shock wave reverberated through the media work room as news broke that the Brooklyn Nets were trading Kevin Durant to the Suns.

Both that deal and tonight’s Luka-to-the-Lakers deal are where-were-you-when moments.

They are also reminders that NBA players react to this stuff the same way fans do.

The scene in the Portland locker room on Saturday night was a surreal one. Everybody was talking, and not about the game the Blazers had just won. Players were shellshocked just like the rest of us. There are blockbuster trades, and then there’s this, coming down late on a Saturday night with no warning.

By the way, the Blazers thought they were done with Doncic for the year after playing the Mavericks four times in December and January. But their first game back from the All-Star break is against the Lakers on Feb. 20.

“We have to plan for Luka and LeBron, how about that?” Billups said. “It’s pretty crazy. But we’ll see when we get there.”