Let’s talk about Luka.
On Wednesday night, Luka Dončić returned to American Airlines Center in Dallas for the first time since being traded away from the Mavericks to the Lakers in early February. With fans throughout the arena donning “Hvala za vse” shirts (Dončić’s native Slovenian for “Thank you for everything”), it was a seemingly emotional night for the All-NBA guard, who teared up during a pregame tribute to his time with the Mavs. It was moving for spectators as well, even for those of us with no connection to Dallas sports.
What makes this chapter in Dallas Mavericks and NBA history so sobering? Why did this trade strike such a nerve for basketball fans everywhere? To answer these questions, I reach back into my academic toolbox for the ever-useful musings of French sociologist Michel Foucault, and particularly his idea of biopolitics.
In Foucault’s (1978) The History of Sexuality, he presented us with two kinds of politics of the body: anatomo-politics and bio-politics. Anatomo-politics is more focused on the individual body, whereas biopolitics/biopower deals with us as a human people and our larger life processes. This power of the people, Foucault underscored, could be mobilized in the processes of cultural production. Essentially, where you can exert control over bodies, you can exert power.
Rabinow and Rose (2006) parsed these ideas out a bit more clearly, moving from Foucault’s idea of a biopolitic to the concept of biocitizenship, best defined as an ethic of citizenship that dispels ideas of unified/monolithic cultures and instead asks us whose bodies are classified as citizens and why. Mirroring this biocitizenship, biological fandom (coined by Munene Mwaniki in 2017) offers a theoretical framework wherein fandom is constituted along biological lines.
Biological fandom allows us as fans to reduce athletes to their biovalue – or what their bodies can do for us. In the age of analytics, biological fandom is the norm for sports fans. Take, for instance, the practices of sports betting and fantasy sports. Biovalue is a particularly relevant lens of inquiry through which to study both of these practices, as they arguably contribute to a troublesome media environment that emboldens and rewards the objectification of athletes. We reduce athletes down to the metrics of their performance for the sake of our own enjoyment, and it likely has ill effects for how we think about their humanity and subjectivity.
The biology of athletes is becoming more and more central to our sporting landscape. But if our fandom is demarcated by biopolitics, then it is surely a fragile fandom at best. Not only are we grappling with an already complicated body politic of masculinity in sport, but modern sport has proven to be an unstable and dynamic terrain, muddied even further through the increased commodification of sporting bodies.
Let’s get back to Luka. He came to the Mavericks through a draft night trade with the Atlanta Hawks during the 2018 NBA Draft; he was 19 years old. He spent six and a half seasons in Dallas, securing five First Team All-NBA honors in that time (the only year he didn’t receive an All-NBA nod, he was Rookie of the Year). Dončić holds the Mavs franchise record for triple doubles (80) and won the 2023-2024 NBA scoring title, notching 33.9 points per game.
Dončić has also had some limited, but notable playoff success. He holds the NBA record for most points in a playoff debut (42), and led the Mavericks to the 2024 Finals, where they lost 4-1 to the Boston Celtics. Dončić is also well on his way to carving out a lasting legacy in basketball history. He and Lakers teammate LeBron James are the only players in NBA history to record 10,000+ points, 3,000+ rebounds and 3,000+ assists all before the age of 25. Dončić is one of only three players in history with five All-NBA first Team selections before age 26. The others? Tim Duncan and Kevin Durant. He’s done it all, and he’s done it all in Dallas.
That’s where it starts to get complicated.
The growing visibility and permanence of spectator sports in new media coupled with our growing access to that media has resulted in a hypersurveillance of the sporting body; we have essentially unfettered access to athletes’ bodies. As Mwaniki put it, “sports media creates and encourages a normalizing biological gaze upon athletes”. We have arguably created an entire industry around this biological fannish gaze: think of the NFL Scouting Combine, or ESPN’s Sport Science programming, or all of the analysts whose job dictates their constant analysis of the athletic body and what it can perform. With that normalizing gaze comes expectations of how the body should perform and what it should look like. Essentially, we are using the increased datafication of athletes to construct aesthetic and performance-based archetypes of human bodies.
When Dončić was traded from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers in what is now considered one of the most shocking trades in sports history, fans immediately sought answers as to why the Mavs would sign away their young superstar, who had led the team to an NBA Finals appearance the season prior. Despite Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison’s assertions that the move would make the Mavs stronger defensively, narratives surfaced from every corner of the internet concerning Dončić’s body and its performance. Was it the clubbing? His affinity for beer? Was he not training properly? Maybe it was the Texas BBQ that had tipped the scales on Dončić’s time in Dallas.
If we assume the relationship between sports fandom and biopolitics, we understand that the biological sports fan has certain ideas about how the sporting body should perform, and that it is increasingly easier for the biological fan to discard the athletic body when it stops performing how it ‘should’. But Dončić hadn’t stopped performing at a high level. He was consistently blowing through NBA records and had brought Dallas back to the Finals for the first time since the franchise’s only title win in 2011.
In terms of biological fandom, Dončić hadn’t done anything to merit ‘discarding’ him; he’d actually done everything to the contrary. He committed to not just the Mavericks organization, but the wider Dallas community. He gave his body up for the organization and seemingly intended to continue to do so for the rest of his career. Former Mavs head coach Rick Carlisle notably called Dončić a “franchise foundation piece” back when he was drafted.
And none of it mattered. None of the All-NBA selections. Not the Finals run, nor the scoring title, nor the fact that after moving across the world at 19 years old he had managed to build a beautiful life in Dallas with a community and fanbase that he loved. At the end of the day, some executives decided his biovalue had dried up, and that was that. Traded without so much as a phone call.
It’s depressing. But it’s our reality unless we find some way out of it. We created the sport media ecosystem that constantly examines and reexamines the athletic body. We fostered this commodified hypersurveillance. We created biological fandom and express our entitlement by inscribing desires and demands onto athletes’ bodies. And we move further and further from recognizing athletes’ humanity with every push for datafication.
It follows that it’s our job to fix it.