No, the Mavericks did not edit Luka Dončić out of a hype video, but it's not surprising fans are still upset

It's hard to think of a single move that has inspired more animus from a fanbase than the Dallas Mavericks trading Luka Dončić in the dead of night. Three weeks later, Dallas fans still aren't very forgiving.

It wasn't just that the Mavericks traded away a 25-year-old superstar, a thing that pretty much never happens in the NBA. It was that they questioned his conditioning and fit with the team through leaks to reporters on his way out, then got quite defensive as the criticism continued.

So when the Mavericks posted a rather curious hype video in which some players were blacked out, it naturally led to the assumption that Dallas was attempting to hide the fact that Dončić ever played for them. Several outlets wrote articles built on that premise.

The responses to the video were ... hostile.

The apparent audacity of the Mavericks made for good social media fodder. However, while the players the Mavericks blacked out are indeed no longer with the team, none of them is Dončić.

WFAA tracked down the original clips that were blacked out and confirmed it was actually Quentin Grimes and Maxi Kleber who got the redacted treatment. Like Dončić, both players were sent away at the trade deadline, Kleber as part of the Dončić deal and Grimes in a trade for Caleb Martin with the Philadelphia 76ers.

Former Mavericks employee Bobby Karalla also noted the blacking out of players has actually been a longstanding team policy:

Despite that policy, Kleber and Grimes are actually visible in a few clips in the video. Kleber can be seen at the 55-second and 1:05 mark, while Grimes is there at 1:01. Dončić can also be seen at 1:46.

So what we have here is a bit of a miss, one that shows just how miserable it is over in Dallas these days. In this case, it was a hostile fanbase and content-hungry social media accounts running headfirst into a rather odd, and not fully realized, policy in the Mavericks social media platform.

Everyone was ready to believe the Mavericks did something this stupid and petty, because that is how low expectations have become. And it seems like the only two ways to make anything better is to win a championship in the next few years — while hoping Dončić and the Los Angeles Lakers don't — or ride the slow passage of time until fans are finally thinking of something else.

It is both an unenviable and self-created position.