Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison held an end-of-season press conference Monday afternoon. It was just six days after a closed-door, no-cameras-allowed "roundtable" with invite-only media members, where being allowed to record the event needed to be negotiated last minute.
The press conference on Monday lasted roughly 30 minutes, far less than last week's hour-and-change discussion where Harrison was peppered with tough questions from local and national Dallas media members. Still, while Harrison wanted to talk about the season at-large, the only topic worth mentioning was the mind-boggling decision to trade Luka Dončić in February.
Harrison hammered on his often-uttered mantra "defense wins championships" when asked about why they chose to trade Dončić, which we've heard at least a dozen times now. But what was perhaps most illuminating was when he was asked if he knew how much outrage there would be from fans after the trade.
"I did know that Luka was important to the to the fanbase, I didn't quite know to what level," Harrison responded. "But really, the way we looked at it is, if you're putting a team on the floor that's Kyrie [Irving], Klay [Thompson], P.J. [Washington], Anthony Davis and [Dereck] Lively II, we feel that's a championship caliber team, and we would have been winning at a high level, and that would have quieted some of the outrage. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do that."
I'm sorry, what? How could the general manager of the Dallas Mavericks not know how much Dončić meant to this franchise? If Dirk Nowitzki is the most important person in Mavs history, Dončić is very easily the second. Since the moment Nowitzki retired in 2019, which happened to be Dončić's rookie season, the Slovenian superstar became the face of the franchise. Everything Dallas has done in the six and a half seasons since he was drafted was done to build around him. Harrison knows that, because every move he made up until the Dončić trade was done to put the best team around him so that he could lead the Mavericks to a championship, which he almost did last season.
Harrison not knowing how much Dončić meant to the fanbase is the problem, and that disconnect is going to continue to cost the Mavericks the longer he's in charge.
During Harrison's invite-only media session, he was asked if he felt the team had to win fans back after trading Dončić, to which he responded, "Putting the roster on the floor with Kyrie, Klay, P.J., Anthony Davis and Lively. That's a championship caliber team. And although the fans could have been upset with trading Luka, they wouldn't have been upset with the results."
Harrison said something similar Monday afternoon, suggesting that fans will feel differently once the Mavericks start winning games. But that line of thinking ignores a very important aspect about what it is to be a fan: the connection you create with the specific players on the team. The connection Mavericks fans and the city of Dallas built with Dončić was incredibly strong. Everyone knew that. His foundation, aimed at helping teach kids the game of basketball, was based in Dallas until his trade to the Lakers.
Even putting aside the off-court community involvement, the Mavericks aren't a franchise that have a ton of iconic players whose jersey numbers hang in the rafters like the Lakers and Celtics. And this isn't a team who had a guy who regularly sparks greatest of all time debates like the Chicago Bulls. So when Dallas was able to trade for Dončić on draft night in 2018, it was one of the biggest moments in franchise history.
But Harrison doesn't see or understand that. He thinks fans will come as long as the team wins, regardless of what the roster looks like, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding of both the Mavericks fanbase and what it is to be a fan as a whole.
