Wednesday’s matchup between the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Lakers marked Dončić’s first game in Dallas since being traded away on Feb. 2 in a blockbuster deal that landed Anthony Davis in Dallas. Ahead of the matchup, the Mavericks honored Dončić with a video tribute that brought the five-time All-Star to tears.

Dončić’s eyes grew glossy as he tried to keep his composure during the tribute. He repeatedly wiped his eyes with a towel and had to look away from the jumbotron at one point as he was overcome by emotion.

The ESPN broadcast showed Dallas Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki applauding in the crowd. Following the video, Dončić shared an embrace with Markieff Morris, who was also traded from Dallas to Los Angeles. Dončić hugged the rest of his Lakers teammates, including LeBron James, before the Lakers huddled together ahead of tipoff.

Dončić predicted his return would be emotional for him.

“Of course it’s going to be a lot of emotion for me. I really don’t know what to expect,’ Dončić told reporters Tuesday night following the Lakers’ 126-99 loss against the Oklahoma City Thunder. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to feel, honestly. I’m looking forward to being back in Dallas, obviously, with the fans, seeing my teammates — ex-teammates. It’s going to be very emotional for me, for sure.’

When the game tipped off, Dallas fans showcased their enduring love for Dončić and cheered every time he touched the ball. On the other side of the spectrum, the Mavericks fanbase also chanted ‘Fire Nico,’ referring to Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison, who brokered the blockbuster trade. Harrison was spotted watching the beginning of the game from the tunnel instead of a seat.

Earlier Wednesday, a protest mural that features a navy Mavericks hat with a piece of duct tape over the logo that reads, ‘FIRE NICO,’ popped up in downtown Dallas ahead of Dončić’s return.

This story was updated with new information.

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AUGUSTA, Ga. – Every year since the world could see the place on television, this little town near the border of Georgia and South Carolina has been the epicenter of our retreat out of a long winter and into spring.

That’s always been the secret sauce of the Masters. Not the exclusivity of the club, nor the difficulty of the course, nor really the fact that it’s the only major championship in golf anchored to one place every year.

Mostly, it’s the visuals, the colors, perfectly green fairways framed by the towering pines and flowers that pop off the television screen like an invitation to once again start going outside. As always, every inch of this place is spectacular.

“A colder-than-normal January has been conducive to a near-perfect early spring bloom of Azaleas and other flowering ornamentals,” Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley said Wednesday. “One of our guests last week referred to the course as a beautiful painting, and I could not agree more.”

But the biggest golf tournament in the world has only grown in prestige over the past four years – not that it needed any help. The still unresolved fight between the PGA Tour and LIV, still simmering for a third straight Masters, has only made this tournament more powerful and elevated its place atop the sport’s food chain.

The sad reality is that it’s been nine months since Xander Schauffele won the Open Championship at Royal Troon. That’s nine months since all the best players in the world were in the same tournament. Nine months since we saw Rory McIlroy go against Brooks Koepka in a significant event, nine months since Scottie Scheffler has had a chance to close out a tournament with Bryson DeChambeau breathing down his neck.

Nearly two years since the so-called framework agreement that was supposed to bring the two sides into some type of merger agreement and almost three months since president Donald Trump’s inauguration – an event that inspired hope of reconciliation given his ties to the game and extensive business with the Saudi government – everyone is still waiting.

“I think at some point if the players get all together, I think we could figure it out,” DeChambeau said. “But it’s a lot more complicated, obviously, than we all think.”

At this point, it’s almost boring to talk about. LIV does its thing, paying huge sums to Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelson and a handful of others to play unserious golf while drawing pathetic television audiences. (Even on the main FOX network last week, LIV Miami drew less than one-third of the 1.746 million viewers watching the final round of the Valero Texas Open.)

But LIV’s intrusion into the sport has undeniably made the PGA Tour a significantly lesser product, too, and not just on the margins. The Tour’s so-called “Signature Event” structure, in which eight tournaments are elevated above the others, means the top players have even less incentive to play a full schedule and so there are rarely fields packed with stars – a split within a split. Aside from The Players, has there even been a single must-see tournament yet this year?

That’s golf now: Weaker, less interesting, rarely relevant to the average sports fan outside of the four majors. Round and round we go, with little to suggest a solution is coming that would reunite the best players and give fans – not to mention the companies paying huge sums to sponsor most of these tournaments – a reason to keep spending their cash on professional golf.

“When I think about reunification,” Ridley said, “I think about the having more players – all of the great players of the game – playing against each other more than just a few times a year. I’m not really in a position to say what form that should take as far as how the two organizations should come together, what legal structure that may be or what the financial aspects of that may be. But sometimes if you start kind of at eye level, and that is to encourage cooperation and trying to figure out a way to get something done, regardless of what the structure of it is, to where everyone can play together again.”

For the broader good of the game, Ridley is of course correct.

But as long as the split endures, the Masters benefits more than anyone.

Why? Well, most golf fans could probably tell you that McIlroy comes into the Masters with as good of a chance as he’s ever had, having won twice already this year including The Players. They could probably tell you how Scheffler, the defending champion here and No. 1 player in the world, has been struggling by his standards but flashed a hot putter last weekend that makes him extra dangerous this week. And they could probably tell you that Schauffele, who won two majors last year, has been way off form to start this season and is yet to record a top-10 finish.

And the LIV guys? When the final major championship ends in July, they simply disappear into the ether. Yes, they are playing tournaments. Some of those tournaments even draw good crowds, particularly in an Australian market that deserves more world class golf than it gets. But if you know a single thing about how Patrick Reed, Rahm, Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Cam Smith and the rest have been faring lately on the LIV tour, you are in the minority of the minority of golf fans.

Now in its fourth season, there’s enough of a sample size to make the following statement: Whatever you think about the concept of LIV or who’s paying its bills, the results over there simply do not matter to very many people. Nothing has broken through. Nobody’s really watching

 In fact, in four years, you can argue the only player-related LIV storyline that has been elevated to any relevance is a highly online argument between real people and social media trolls over whether four-time LIV winner Joaquin Niemann is one of the top-10 players in the world. (Given that he’s never finished better than 16th at any major, I think we all know the answer to that one.)

Point being, for all the significant players who took the LIV payday, the Masters is when they come out of the mothballs. Has Koepka or Rahm played well lately? Who knows. Who cares. When Masters week begins, it’s like reuniting with a friend who spent the last year in western Mongolia without Internet or cell phone service. We’re just happy to see them again.

“When you look back at whenever LIV started and this whole debacle started, no one really complained,” Collin Morikawa said. “You just…we enjoyed it. But then this all happened, and you take things for granted. You look back and you’re like, man, we had it pretty good. These weeks are special now. You don’t take them lightly.”

Make no mistake, the Masters is a colossus whether LIV exists or not. To golfers and hardcore fans, it’s special because it’s a major. To the common sports viewer who watches this tournament and maybe a few others, it’s the visual effects – the sparkling white sand, the vividly pink flowers, the perfectly mowed grass − that inspire imagination and awe.

But the PGA Tour-LIV split has made this week something different, even a level above what the Masters was before. Golf fans just don’t get many tournaments like this anymore. That’s a sad commentary on the state of the game but another layer of mystique for a 365-acre tract of Georgia land that was already the biggest thing in the sport.

WASHINGTON – A few hours before the Los Angeles Dodgers concluded their three-game series at Nationals Park Wednesday, a stadium TV tuned to Major League Baseball’s official network displayed two hosts running through a series of burning questions.

Between discussions of torpedo bats and sustainable starts came a question that might have startled the casual viewer.

“Are the Dodgers not a superteam?”

The hot topic seemed to affirm that the most expensive team in baseball history exists not as one of 30 big league franchises but rather as a vessel created to produce discourse, which will then be met with further discourse. That a superteam could exist in a sport that required the Dodgers to use 60 players to win the 2024 World Series – yet perhaps it actually isn’t the 2025 Dodgers since they’d lost four out of five games, dropping their record to 9-4.

Which is still a 112-win pace.

Such is life with roughly $390 million in salary commitments, a World Series title to defend and spring rumblings that this squad of Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts and nine or so viable starting pitchers would be the ones to break the major league record of 116 regular-season wins, perhaps threaten 120.

Yet this early season has already hatched a series of suboptimal events, from a freak aggravation of first baseman Freddie Freeman’s ankle injury, to $182 million lefty Blake Snell’s shoulder irritation sending him to the injured list, conjuring visions that come playoff time, this nearly half-billion dollar commitment to excellence will once again be trotting out bullpen games or fringe starters.

And after the squad dropped its first two games in D.C., with a trip to the White House followed by dismal performances in 45-degree temperatures, the great expectations breeded not panic but rather one of the mini-bursts of urgency that sustain great teams through long seasons.

So the Dodgers greeted their road trip finale with both urgency and pluck, snagging a four-run lead before the Washington Nationals could record an out, giving it right back as fill-in starter Landon Knack struggled, and finally cobbling together a two-run, go-ahead rally in the seventh inning for a 6-5 victory that salvaged the final game of the series.

The Dodgers are 10-4 now, technically tied for second in the National League West even as the standings are secondary this time of year. Yet even hiccups can look calamitous when near-perfection is the expectation.

“It comes with the character of the group,” says longtime utilityman Kiké Hernández, who finished his caretaking of first base while Freeman mends with a game-saving play in the ninth inning. “You have a lot of very seasoned people in this locker room. It’s realizing we have another 148 to go.

“And you know when you’re expected to win 162 games in a season, and you lose four in a week, then it could feel like the world is ending. But at the end of the day, we have 148 more. At some point, we were going to play (lousy) baseball, and it seemed like this was the week we did that.”

Wednesday, the temperature topped the 50-degree mark, practically balmy after 46- and 45-degree nights here, along with a rain-drenched slog in losing their final game at Philadelphia. And it only gets sunnier: The Dodgers are headed home, and Freeman – who tweaked his surgically-repaired ankle slipping in the shower – will be back in the lineup Friday against the Chicago Cubs.

Yet the club learned a lot about itself in this detour toward mediocrity.

Foot up on the gas

It’s been a quarter-century since the New York Yankees became the last club to repeat as World Series champions. The Dodgers seem about as primed as any club since to do so, what with Snell, Japanese pitching phenom Rōki Sasaki and All-Star relievers Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates refreshing the mix over the winter.

But personnel, despite the superteam expectations, only goes so far. And after the Dodgers began this trip unbeaten only to lose series to both the Phillies and Nationals while breaking down in every phase of the game, manager Dave Roberts was not having any complacency.

“We don’t want to get swept by these guys,” Roberts said before Wednesday’s series finale. “That wouldn’t be a good thing. I think our guys have a good look today. There’s a sense of pride, right? To not only win a series but potentially get swept by anyone isn’t a good feeling.

“I expect us to perform today.”

It’s almost like they heard him: Ohtani and Betts reached base ahead of Tommy Edman’s two-run triple, and Teoscar Hernández’s two-run homer created a 4-0 lead.

Knack gave it all back – plus one more – which forced the Dodgers to scrape together their winning rally, with Teoscar Hernández providing the winning margin with a soft single to right in the seventh.

Did they feel Roberts’ urgency?

“Not really,” says Teoscar Hernández.

Hey, no shade toward the manager. It’s just that the Dodgers know what they need.

“Those are the at-bats you want to win games,” he says. “It’s not always gonna be the big swings that are going to score runs. We’re going to score a lot of runs by the walks, by not getting into double plays, by getting the lucky hits I get in that situation.”

Run prevention doesn’t hurt, either. Kiké Hernández was one of the Dodgers’ original utility heroes and in Freeman’s absence, took his 5-foot-10 frame to first base, an odd sight on an ostensibly bulletproof team. Hernández is hitting just .103 on the young season, but saved Wednesday’s game with a diving stop in the bottom of the ninth and two runners on, turning a potential game-tying hit into a forceout, thanks largely to his veteran infield instincts.

“I just can’t think of many who make that play right there,” says Roberts. “I think we’d probably still be playing if he didn’t make that play.”

Still, the Dodgers are seeking a higher gear.

‘We have a lot of things to clean up’

It had been about 15 hours since the Dodgers struck out 15 times against a casting call of Washington relievers and Roberts was still annoyed.

Looking back on the club’s 8-0 start, he mused that they didn’t strike out that many times in games against the reigning Cy Young Award winners, fanning six times in a start against the Detroit Tigers’ Tarik Skubal and seven times against the Atlanta Braves and Chris Sale.

“I just don’t think 15 strikeouts with our ballclub should happen,” says Roberts, perhaps unaware that a pair of clubs had at least 18 strikeouts on Opening Day. “I don’t think we’ll see that again this year.”

Bad team at-bats, Roberts called them. The sentiment was not lost on the clubhouse.

“We have a lot of things to clean up,” says Kiké Hernández. “We’ve been having a lot of quick innings. I didn’t think we’ve really ran any starting pitchers out of the game early, which is something we pride ourselves in as a unit. We’ve gotten to some early, but we let them settle down and cruise through the rest of the game.

“There’s a lot of six-inning outings against us, and that’s got to change.”

Yeah, talk about high standards: They’re winning games but not kicking the opposing pitcher’s posterior quickly enough. Yet Hernández had a point: It was 4-0 before Nationals starter Jake Irvin could record an out. He somehow left with a 5-4 lead after six innings.

If style points are a concern, Freeman’s return should help significantly. The three starting pitchers on the IL – Snell, Tony Gonsolin and a fellow named Clayton Kershaw – will figure in at some point.

And despite all this, they’re still playing .714 ball – now on a 116-win pace. Hey, it’s not 162, but it’ll do.

And at the least, they survived the first cold spell of the season.

“Hopefully,” says Kiké Hernández, “L.A. is a little warmer than this.”