Haralabos Voulgaris compared the dysfunction within the Dallas Mavericks during his tenure to “high school drama.”
Voulgaris was the former director of quantitative research and development for the franchise.
Voulgaris had tension with Donnie Nelson in particular.
“I wanted to be a part of something. I wanted to win basketball games,” Voulgaris told Pablo Torre on the ESPN Daily podcast. “Changing the organizational structure of the Dallas Mavericks was never something I was interested in unless I was going to be the guy in charge, and I wasn’t even sure. I never actually wanted to be the guy in charge until it became clear that the guy in charge didn’t want me around. And then I was like, ‘Oh, OK, now it’s competitive.’ …
“But when it became personal, like then the competitive part of me started to kind of kick in. Like, ‘Oh, this guy wants me out of here.’ It never became obvious that he wanted me out of there. You can just read between the lines a little bit. You can kind of see. Just to be very clear, the first two years or whatever, Donnie was very pleasant around me when I was there. It’s just, you hear certain things, you learn certain things, you’re told certain things. It was a very gossipy workplace, very gossipy. It was like a sewing circle over there.”
Voulgaris started consulting for the Mavs on a full-time basis in 2016 and was hired as a full-time executive in 2018, when he said former coach Rick Carlisle “had to bless the hire.”
“I sent [Cuban] an email where I was like, ‘Hey, look, I’m just trying to fit in. I appreciate the opportunity. I don’t want to ruffle any feathers,'” Voulgaris said. “And he was very clear, like, ‘No, I don’t want you to fit in. We’re deficient in areas that you’re good at. If it’s hard, hard conversations have to be had.’ Looking back on it, it was kind of like I was this missile to go in there and create the change and unlock some boulders that couldn’t be moved before.”