The embattled GM provided a masterclass of evasion, omission, and obfuscation. It will never be enough to deflect his infamy in Dallas lore.
Mavs Governor Patrick Dumont mandated Dallas Mavericks General Manager Nico Harrison to address the media before the Luka Doncic return game on April 9th. That presser was postponed, much like you might delay a trip to the dentist or DMV. Ostensibly unable to delay this interaction any longer and aiming to curb the use of his voice and image after the fact in various forms of media, Harrison, alongside gallant human shield CEO Rick Welts, met with handpicked media members on Tuesday. An awkward no-cameras/microphones-allowed, cloak-and-dagger maneuver that backfired spectacularly.
Having no shortage of flowery, circular statements that lead back to his inch-deep rationale makes listening to Harrison a slog. This is toxic positivity in a distillation. Corporate double-speak straight out of Severance or Black Mirror – where the well-practiced executive parrots predetermined talking points with only minor deviations meant to go back on track towards core themes in a sentence or two. Evading the heart of the matter is far easier when there are 15 reporters in the room lobbing questions, many of them hard-hitting and warranted, rather than one interviewer ready to dole out a verbal pincer maneuver.
Here we peer past the smoke screens and do our best to get at what Harrison is really saying and – worse yet – what he knows he cannot say publicly.
Hello, I Must Be Going!
Christian Clark, the Athletic
Nico, Tim talked about the pick situation. I mean, you’ve said in the past is the three-to four-year window. I think clearly this is a team built to win right now. Was just curious, do you see yourself in Dallas long term, do you want to be this team’s GM in 2028-2029?
Nico Harrison
Yeah. I mean, I have three years left on my contract, I see myself finishing it out. In terms of Dallas, like, this is our home. My family, they’re gonna finish school here. This is where, this is where we live. So, this is where I’m living.
Much like the title of Phil Collins’ 1982 album Hello, I Must Be Going!, Harrison makes it clear he is here for a good time, not a long time. The desire to keep your kids in school rather than uproot them is something most people can relate to, and it speaks to the rationale for “this is where we live, so this is where I’m living.” Harrison has no long-term future here, based on his admission.
If you knew the world was ending tomorrow, you’d spend today differently. If you had a year to live, you might spend your savings differently. With Harrison knowing his best-case scenario is three more years in a job with no plan to stay past that point, the shortsighted nature of the Luka Doncic trade begins to take on a supreme selfishness. The NBA draft pick credit card bill is coming due in 2027, and Harrison has no appetite for the dark days he engineered. That much professional fatalism is strangely liberating. No need to pretend you care about what happens to the franchise down the line once your band of thirty-somethings has played out the string. No first-round picks, no tentpole player to keep the franchise out of the NBA abyss, no problem – because he will not be here. If the “move on already” crowd wants to know why so many of us are not excited about winning a play-in game in Sacramento before flaming out in Memphis, this is why. The future is bleak, no matter how many threes Klay Thompson drains in a row or how many games against middling teams Anthony Davis dominates. Luka Doncic was Armageddon insurance. For Harrison, that is superfluous since he knows his era’s furthest end date in advance. Harrison and Kidd will be gone, Welts will be working on the arena, and the Mavericks will be losing a metric ton of games with no place in the lottery to show for it.
The Rolodex Backfired
Ben Swanger, D Magazine
You mentioned that you were targeting AD when you got the term sheet, when you got the offer in front of you, did you ever once consider maybe calling other GMs and seeing if you could get a better offer?
Nico Harrison
Yeah, it’s a great question. Again, our whole time, we wanted a two-way player. Again, our philosophies went in with defense, and AD is at the top of the list, and when we had that opportunity, we struck. In this league, where players really run the league and you guys have seen it with other teams, they dictate where they’re going to go and where they’re not going to go. We had an opportunity to do this quietly, without the interference of that, and so we did it.
Once you accept that Harrison is clear about his departure date and feels no sense of stewardship for the franchise beyond his time in charge, his approach to team building makes a lot of sense. The pursuit of players he had ties to from Team USA and/or Nike is the chief governing principle. Why he zeroed in on Anthony Davis at the expense of potentially getting more from another team is not even the question that should be asked – we already have the answer. Reports of the original Laker offer containing Dalton Knecht and a 2031 first-round pick hinged on Los Angeles being able to get assurances from Doncic that he would sign an extension before the trade. As that would have shattered the secrecy, Harrison was willing to take less to keep the shroud of silence intact. The Mavericks traded for Davis, Max Christie, a first-rounder, and…silence. To be so determined to jettison the most talented player in franchise history that you take less from the only bidder is one of the most grievous cases of front office malpractice in NBA history.
The 2021 headhunting process Mark Cuban commissioned was cut short when he hired Nico Harrison – the lure of the coveted Rolodex was that magnetic. After years of striking out with marquee free agent targets, ‘there’s no way the Mavs will only be used for leverage in this new era’ – must have been the thinking. Here was Harrison – someone who could open a dialogue with potential free agents. Hence, the “Dallas is gonna get a seat at the table” quote from the introductory presser. If you could throw Wonder Woman’s magic lasso around Cuban and get complete honesty in hindsight, I imagine we would hear that the mistake was not in hiring someone who would eventually force him out of the decision tree – the real sin came beforehand. Hiring someone who had no front office experience in anticipation of Harrison’s relationship capital buoying the franchise was pure folly.
In the case of Irving, it worked. In the case of Davis, Hall of Fame resume and all, the Mavericks traded for three more seasons of an oft-injured player at the cost of a decade of relevance, contention, and fanbase connection. The admission Cuban would likely make – if bound by that fictional lasso – is that not only would he never have approved this trade, but no seasoned front-office executive who ever hoped to have a career in the NBA beyond their current posting would ever do such a thing. This makes the hiring of Harrison an abhorrent error in judgment, only brought to fruition years later, once Cuban was out of the picture. Nico Harrison’s irrational disdain for Doncic, obsession with his buddy Davis, and his manipulation of Dumont – now sitting in the seat Cuban had held for so long – was the recipe for disaster. A looming nuclear winter for the franchise, all for the sake of some street cred.
The Big Lie of Omission
Tim MacMahon, ESPN
So first of all, Luka said he was absolutely signing the super max. His decision was made. He was closing on a house here. Why not sign him to that supermax? I know you can’t trade him this year. Can’t trade him this summer. You gotta wait a year and a half. He would be under contract for at least four years at that point, and then he has no say. Damian Lillard wanted to go to Miami. He ended up in Milwaukee. If you want to maximize the value of Luka Dončić, why not use the supermax to your advantage?
Nico Harrison
Well, there’s no guarantee he would have signed a super max, but
Tim MacMahon, ESPN
He has guaranteed— the man was bawling on the bench. Like, come on.
Nico Harrison
Well, like I said, we can agree to disagree, and that’s fine, but we targeted AD. And again, I go back to the same thing. I feel like I’m a broken record, but the team that we intended to put on the floor, which you guys saw for two and a half quarters, that’s a championship caliber team. And so you might not like it, but that’s the fact it is. And so that’s really where we’re at.
In Cleveland, hours after the trade bombshell detonated, Harrison declared this impending “tumultuous summer” averted. It is extremely important to tether that quote with the one above, as ESPN’s Tim MacMahon gives Harrison every opportunity to state the obvious – the Mavericks were never going to offer Luka Doncic the supermax.
Luka is still using the busted phone he threw across the room once he realized the news was real and made it clear in an interview with ESPN’s Malika Andrews that he had intended to follow Dirk’s path of career-long loyalty to Dallas. Harrison prophylactically raised doubt surrounding Doncic gaining leverage ahead of the final year of his current contract to provide a narrative fig leaf. If Nico Harrison was starkly honest about his decision to never offer the supermax, a key part of his flimsy narrative falls apart.
No supermax-eligible player has ever declined to sign the deal. This means no organization has ever decided against offering it. Admitting the post-Cuban Mavericks were no longer going to invest in Doncic opens up a can of other questions (when was the decision not to offer the supermax made inside the brain trust?) and makes the PR nightmare orders of magnitude worse for this regime. Even if it meant gaining leverage to orchestrate a more favorable trade down the line (much the way the Portland Trailblazers handled the Damian Lillard situation), Harrison would have had to wait well into his remaining three-year window to pull off a deal post-Supermax.
There have been so many questions asked since this trade. How could this happen? Why would the Mavericks do this? It is all so very simple if we are being honest with ourselves and tuning out the doublespeak flowing from the front office. Harrison was and remains unqualified for the job, does not plan to stay beyond his contract, and never planned to offer Doncic the supermax. Pure and simple. Now imagine one reporter (instead of fifteen) armed with a line of questioning from that vantage point, with cameras rolling.
Patrick Dumont is the only person who can short-circuit the remainder of Harrison’s reign of one-man fantasy basketball. The veterans on this team are fine players, some with Hall of Fame careers already cemented. Trading these players represents the only path to a short rebuild versus a banishment to the wilderness for a decade or more. Given how much Dumont claims losing the “championship games” impacted him, I wonder how 12-18 wins and no lottery pick to show for it season after season, as the new arena is being built, will feel a few years down the line.
Pain now, or more pain later. This is Patrick Dumont’s fork in the road moment, even if he does not realize it until it is far too late. As for Nico Harrison, the opening track entitled “I Don’t Care Anymore” off the aforementioned Phil Collins album will serve as his anthem for his remaining days as General Manager of the Dallas Mavericks.