Tim MacMahon published a piece on ESPN Wednesday morning highlighting the power struggle between former Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban and recently-fired general manager Nico Harrison. In the nearly 4000 words MacMahon wrote, there are examples of deception and pettiness by both parties, and he paints a picture that makes your stomach turn thinking about what was going on behind the scenes for nearly two years. Cuban was illustrated as the guy who wanted a seat at the table he just auctioned
off, and Harrison was described as irritated and cold towards Cuban for undermining the job he was hired to do. There was a dynamic between the two Mavericks decision makers that was never going to work. And when Patrick Dumont obtained the final say from Cuban in December of 2023, Doncic’s security in Dallas began a freefall we would only learn about after the damage had been done.
Behind the scenes, it was a mess. Harrison won the battle to curry favor with Dumont after their run to the NBA Finals in 2024. Cuban was “iced out” as Harrison reportedly proved he could “do no wrong” by building a team that went to the “championship games”, to put it into Dumont’s words. MacMahon explained that this proof of ability allowed Harrison to cut out the middleman and thus made Cuban the world’s richest and most prominent fan. It was around the same time that MacMahon explained Harrison blamed Dallas’ NBA Finals loss on Doncic’s defensive pitfalls. And, because Dumont trusted Harrison, he didn’t ask any questions.
For nearly a year pre-trade, the Mavericks had an almost impossible collection of people running an organization with the league’s top (ish) asset on the team, and the most important one valued Doncic at much less than that. In one corner, you had Mark Cuban: the guy who believed he could sell his business and retain decision-making power, a thing that has literally never happened in the history of business. In the other, you had Nico Harrison: one of the game’s dullest basketball minds with an ego and petty demeanor, who had been waiting for an opportunity to jump Cuban as the organization’s lead thinker. And, at the top, was Patrick Dumont: a man with a lot of cash and a small amount of basketball knowledge, looking for something to lean on in his adolescent years as an owner and governor. At the moment the Luka Doncic trade happened, it seemed impossible. Knowing what we know now, I don’t think this story could have ended any other way.
The Luka Doncic tale will always be a sad one in North Texas. There isn’t a fan who doesn’t remember where they were when the news broke. However, it does soften the blow slightly to know that there was nothing that could be done. It wasn’t an honest mistake by level-headed people; this was the culmination of a toxic hierarchy that boiled over in the only way it could have. Luka Doncic was traded when Mark Cuban bought the team, as his persistence in being in the room was always going to make a future governor and general manager resentful of his presence. Doncic was gone when Harrison was hired because his pride and insistence on being the sole correct voice consumed him. When Dumont bought the team, his lack of awareness of who Doncic was, both as a player on the court and as an inspiration for an entire city (and country of Slovenia), gave way for the franchise to be vulnerable to losing him.
It’s like when a football coach says the game was won six months ago in training camp and not during the game. The implication is that the framework had been laid, and the results just followed. Well, the framework had been laid for this move in Dallas for months, and maybe years, before February 1st. It was just a matter of when, not if.
