There’s a specific kind of anxiety that lives in your phone now.
You’re at the grocery store or walking the dog or doing whatever normal people do in July when basketball isn’t happening, and a notification slides down from the top of the screen. Shams Charania, ESPN. You see a player’s name. Kyle Anderson. You see the years. You see the dollar figure. But you can’t see the team. Not until you tap it. Not until you open the app and let the full post load and your stomach does that little half-second
gymnastics routine while your brain screams please don’t be Dallas, please don’t be Dallas, please don’t be…
Toronto Raptors.
Oh, thank the basketball gods.
This has happened to me at least five times in the last week. And every single time, the relief has been real, physical, almost spiritual. Because the Mavericks are having a quietly excellent offseason, and a huge part of what makes it excellent is what they haven’t done.
Masai Ujiri’s front office drafted Morez Johnson Jr. at nine. They grabbed Sergio de Larrea later in the first round via trade. They appear committed to holding onto Kyrie Irving as he returns to the floor this year. They traded a heavily protected first-round pick and two future seconds for Santi Aldama, a 25-year-old combo forward who averaged 14 points and nearly seven rebounds last year. They have a year-two Cooper Flagg who won’t turn 20 until December. Dereck Lively II is reportedly 7’3” now with a 7’9” wingspan. The positive ledger is long and it’s real.
But I want to talk about the negative space. The signings that didn’t happen. The alternate timeline.
The Darkest Timeline Has a Name
Because here’s the thing: as dark as the actual timeline got after the Dončić trade, we can imagine a darker one. A timeline where Nico Harrison and Jason Kidd are still running this franchise, scrolling through free agent lists with the same philosophical blinders that produced the worst trade in franchise history and perhaps in professional sports.
Harrison’s front office had a type. If you came up through the AAU circuit, if you were a sneaker-convention fixture, if you were a recognizable NBA name who could be acquired through a relationship rather than through rigorous evaluation, you were in the pipeline and on the dubious trade-target list, where Jrue was perilously close to the Joker. If you were a 20-year-old guard lighting up the ACB in Spain? Probably not on the radar.
The Harrison regime shed its European connective tissue and never replaced it with an overseas find of its own. There was no impactful effort to scout or recruit international talent from overseas that turned over a single gem during that era. The scouting lens was narrowed in its final analysis to who Nico knew or approved of in the abstract, and the results looked like it.
So let’s play a game. Let’s look at a few free agent moves from the last week, imagine how each one might have played out in the somehow-still-here Harrison timeline, and collectively exhale.
Kyle Anderson → Toronto Raptors (1 year, $3.9 million)
Anderson is 32, entering his 13th season, and has been traded to five different teams in the last two years. He’s a solid, unconventional player. In the Harrison timeline, Slow Mo might have been the starting small forward, with Nico calling it “veteran leadership.”
Have a nice season in Toronto, Kyle.
Mike Conley → Boston Celtics (1 year, minimum)
Conley is 38 years old and entering his 20th NBA season. He averaged a career-low 4.5 points in 18 minutes a game last year. He is, by all accounts, a wonderful human being and a respected locker room presence.
He is also the exact player Nico Harrison would have signed instead of trading for Marcus Sasser. I can see the press conference. I can hear the phrase “championship run.” I can feel my soul leaving my body.
Enjoy Boston, Mike.
Keon Ellis → Brooklyn Nets (2 years, $18 million)
Ellis is 26 and a perfectly useful 3-and-D wing who’s a little undersized at 6’4” and not much of a playmaker. He’s not a bad player. He may even be a helpful one in Brooklyn.
That’s the point. A disciplined front office can pass on a decent player because he doesn’t quite fit the build. The old Mavericks too often treated available and familiar as if they were synonyms for sensible. Sometimes the sign of a grown-up front office is not that it avoids obvious disasters. Sometimes it just declines the wrong perfectly fine player at the wrong perfectly fine price.
Good luck in Brooklyn, Keon.
Javonte Green → Detroit Pistons (1 year, $3.95 million)
Green re-signed with Detroit at 32, and this is the one that you can imagine easily in a post-Luka delusional Nico timeline. If he were still here, Harrison could easily be envisioned welcoming Javonte Green as the quintessential “win now charade” signing.
A 30-something journeyman role player who fills a roster spot and lets a GM gesture toward activity without actually building anything. In the Harrison timeline, Green is your sixth man and you’re being told to feel good about it.
Tobias Harris → San Antonio Spurs (2 years, $31 million)
Harris signed with a division rival for $31 million fully guaranteed, pushing his career earnings past $330 million. He’s turning 34 this month. He’s a fine player who will give San Antonio respectable minutes next to Wembanyama.
He’s also the kind of name and price tag that would have had Harrison feeling great about himself at the introductory press conference and Mavericks fans doing cap sheet math by December.
The Spurs can have him. Bon appétit.
Kyle Lowry → Retired
And then there’s Kyle Lowry, who announced his retirement this week. He’s 40 years old. He played 14 games last season as a locker room mentor in Philadelphia. The Raptors are signing him to a one-day contract on Monday so he can retire in Toronto, where he belongs.
In the Harrison timeline, Nico is on the phone before Kyle even gets the chance to schedule that ceremony. He’s pitching a championship run. He’s talking about those 40-year-old knees having one more season in them. He’s describing a veteran mentorship role that somehow also involves 22 minutes a game.
The Raptors are trying to set up a podium, and Nico Harrison would be trying to talk Kyle Lowry out of using it.
What the Negative Space Tells You
None of this is meant to disrespect any of those players. They’ve all had real careers and earned their money. The point is about organizational philosophy, and what it reveals when a front office consistently declines to do the thing that the previous regime would have done reflexively.
The Ujiri front office didn’t sign a single one of those players. They drafted a dynamic frontcourt player from Michigan, whose coach they just hired. They drafted a guard from the top Spanish league who’s drawing blatantly unfair early comparisons to another nifty passer with a Euro league past. They traded for a young combo forward on a team-friendly deal. Everything they’ve done has felt intentional. Even the things that haven’t worked out feel like they came from a plan rather than from panic.
John Hollinger of The Athletic named the Mavericks free agency “losers” this week, arguing that the frontcourt additions are making Cooper Flagg’s development trajectory as difficult as possible.
I think that read misses the phase of the build.
The Mavericks are rebuilding. You don’t pass on Morez Johnson Jr. at nine because Daniel Gafford is still on the roster. You don’t decline to trade for a 25-year-old combo forward at Aldama’s price because PJ Washington is still here. Those are veteran contracts, and veteran contracts move. There are months between now and the start of the regular season, and there is at least another year before genuine playoff aspirations should extend beyond a first-round exit at best.
Ujiri has been in the job for five proverbial minutes. The roster has open surgery scheduled. Diagnosing the patient mid-procedure and calling it a failure is the kind of analysis that sounds smart in a column and evaporates the moment a single trade clears the logjam that everyone, including the front office, already knows is there.
I’d love to be proven wrong on the timeline and see meaningful basketball deep into the playoffs out of nowhere. But calling this offseason a loss because the rebuild isn’t finished in week one? Bleak and dour stuff from a guy who should know better.
The Mavericks aren’t done building. The offseason still has moves to make and questions to answer. But right now, every time a Shams notification slides down your screen and the team turns out to be someone else, you can exhale.
The adults are running this.
Have a nice season, gentlemen. Genuinely. Just not here.
