The Bounce Newsletter 
| This is The Athletic’s daily NBA newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Bounce directly in your inbox.
Right after we hit send on The Bounce yesterday, the Dallas Mavericks put an end to the Nico Harrison era. It lasted four-plus years and saw maybe the most shocking turn in NBA history. We’re going to dive into how all of this built up and then fell apart.
No more vision
Here’s why the Mavs fired their GM
The quick, easy answer is he traded a 25-year-old Luka Dončić sans trade request, demand or threat he’d leave in free agency. We could end the discussion there. While I think the move definitely led to his demise with the Mavs, the way he handled it publicly was ultimately his undoing.
On the night of the NBA Draft lottery, the Dallas Mavericks had a 1.8 percent chance of winning the No. 1 pick. And it happened. Immediately, people screamed that it was rigged for gifting Luka to the Los Angeles Lakers. People wanted lottery reform for all the wrong reasons (unweigh the lottery!). When we knew the Mavs were going to get Cooper Flagg added to what Harrison had just done to revamp the roster, he threw out a ridiculous quote that will forever be used against him and this era of Mavericks basketball.
“Now you see the vision.”
What? The vision was to trade Luka and then hope subsequent injuries forced the season to fall apart enough to end up with the 1.8 percent chance of getting the top pick in a special draft class? That seems more like a fever dream than a vision. Nobody bought his “told you so” type of reaction.
In reality, Harrison built up a title contender around Luka and then dismantled it because of a flawed vision and an apparent disdain for Dončić’s physical state. When you break down the trade between the Mavs and Lakers, the logic is beyond fallible. Harrison didn’t want Luka long-term on a super-max contract (which would have eventually been around $80 million per season) because he didn’t trust Dončić to take care of his body and stay healthy.
So he traded for Anthony Davis, a player so perpetually dealing with injuries that Charles Barkley nicknamed him “Street Clothes.” In the process, he only got one first-round pick along with Davis and never made a concerted push to acquire Austin Reaves too. He didn’t want it getting out that he was trading Luka until the last minute because of how it would ignite the public and the NBA. That’s a sign you’re making an awful move.
However, he had a working relationship with AD from his Nike days, as he did with Kyrie Irving. And to his credit, the Kyrie move in 2023 was highly questioned as a big risk. That worked out beautifully, with a trip to the NBA Finals a year and a half later.
Harrison was regarded as one of the best executives in the league right up until the Luka trade news broke. After that, “Fire Nico” reverberated inside the American Airlines Center. And to pretend that getting Flagg with a 1.8 percent chance was always the plan? You have to be openly confident in how you sell such a drastic, unpopular change to a franchise.
Harrison never came off as believing his own sales pitch. It felt like he was selling a timeshare to Mavs fans that was rooted more in vacationing in the trainer’s room rather than in the arena in June every year. Especially after all of the reporting around the deal, it just felt personal in an unhealthy way with how Harrison viewed one of the best players in the world. That could never overcome a half-baked justification of his own trade.
Now the Mavs are off to a horrific 3-8 start, AD is in and out of the lineup, we don’t know when Kyrie is coming back from the ACL tear he suffered in early March and they have to hope Flagg is good and enticing enough to distract from a horrendous offense. Meanwhile, Luka is averaging close to 40 points per game on the Lakers.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
The last 24
More Harrison reaction, and a plan for the Mavs
🏀 Time to deal. John Hollinger has the next moves for Dallas. Trade AD and build around Flagg.
🔮 Long time coming. Sam Amick believes Harrison’s demise began before the Luka trade. Was it the beer grab?
🏀 Not blameless. Harrison wasn’t the only person responsible for the Luka trade. But Mavs governor Patrick Dumont isn’t going to fire himself, David Aldridge writes.
🏀 New format. The NBA officially announced the new All-Star Game format. USA vs. The World and no positions.
🤝 Top-25 Project. Our quarter-century series continues. Today, we have the top-25 off-court moments since 2000.
🩼 Hamstring strain. Jalen Green wasn’t with the Suns long before his injury. He’ll miss at least a month.
🙏 RIP. Sadly, we’ve had a lot of deaths in the NBA world lately. Four-time All-Star Michael Ray Richardson passed away at 70.
🎧 Tuning in. Today’s “NBA Daily” examines how the Thunder dismantled the Warriors.
Stream the NBA on Fubo (try it for free!) and catch out-of-market games on League Pass.
The timeline
Tracking the abrupt turn in Harrison’s Q Rating
It’s pretty shocking how, in one night, Harrison went from one of the most well-respected and trusted executives to basically a pariah. I mapped out the timeline of Harrison’s position with Dallas from June 2021 until Tuesday when he got fired.
He was questioned for potentially being too enamored with Kyrie from that Nike relationship when he traded for the future Hall of Famer. Kyrie had a rough couple of years, on and off the court, in Brooklyn. Eyebrows were raised with that pairing of him and Dončić.
The next season, after the Mavs had tanked out of the Play-In to protect their pick and ended up with Dereck Lively II, Harrison made deadline deals for Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington. Immediately, Dallas went from a middling West team that couldn’t play defense to the best defensive team in the league over the final 20 games. That catapulted the Mavs into the 2024 finals.
After they lost to the Boston Celtics in five games, Harrison was aggressive in the offseason once again. He brought in Klay Thompson on a sign-and-trade. He signed Naji Marshall and traded for Quentin Grimes. I spoke to Harrison for a SiriusXM NBA Radio interview before the 2024-25 season, and he kept repeating this phrase for how he felt that summer:
“We’re a Klay away” from competing for the title.
Then he got fed up with Dončić’s physical conditioning as the supermax extension loomed on the horizon. That’s when all hell broke loose, and Harrison moved his superstar in the middle of the night to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round pick.
Immediately, the entire fan base turned on him and got super personal. He was protested by the fans! In and out of the arena. Not even getting Flagg seemed to ease the pain of Luka in a Lakers jersey. Now that he’s fired, the Mavs can get some of that much-needed cathartic feeling. But Luka is still gone, and this team is still pretty bad. We don’t know when Kyrie will be healthy. We know Davis can’t be relied on for consistent availability. But at least Mavs fans are at the point in the timeline where they don’t have to scream “Fire Nico!” anymore.
Bad Trade Mount Rushmore
Was dealing Luka the worst trade ever?
We use “the Mount Rushmore of ___” for everything. Point guards. Centers. Fast-food spots. At the same time, it’s a pretty good way to have a discussion about the top-four things in any category. Coming up with a list of the worst trades ever can always be a fun way of walking down nightmare lane and channeling our inner Nelson Muntz to point and laugh.
I contend the Luka trade is the worst of all time. It’s at least in the conversation for it, and it’s certainly getting chiseled into that imaginary Mount Rushmore. Most of us called it the worst trade ever at the time and will continue to do so after Harrison lost his job nine months after making it.
These are my top four.
The Luka trade: You’re worried about a 25-year-old MVP candidate being out of shape and unavailable for the future, so you trade for Davis, a 32-year-old player whom you can’t rely on being available for the future?
The Clippers trade Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari, five firsts and two pick swaps to Oklahoma City for Paul George (2019): It was a hefty price, but the logic at the time was there. If you subscribe to the idea that Kawhi Leonard was only signing with the Clippers if they made the trade for PG (after they couldn’t get Jimmy Butler), then you can justify it, even in retrospect. It just turned out to be unbelievably lopsided — and the Clippers still owe their 2026 unprotected first-round pick!
Golden State trades Robert Parish and the 1980 third pick to Boston for the 1980 first and 13th picks: The Warriors took Joe Barry Carroll, who was later nicknamed “Joe Barely Cares,” with the first pick. They took Rickey Brown (played five seasons) with the 13th. Parish helped the Celtics win championships, and Boston took Kevin McHale with the third pick. Yikes!
Brooklyn trades Kris Humphries, Keith Bogans, Gerald Wallace, Kris Joseph, MarShon Brooks, three firsts and a pick swap to Boston for Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Jason Terry and DJ White (2013): The Nets were trying to make a big statement with their move to Brooklyn. They wanted to win right away. KG and Pierce were old by then, and the picks and pick swaps netted Boston Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum (with another trade).
Honorable mention: Cleveland trades a future pick that becomes James Worthy and Butch Lee to the Lakers for Don Ford (played 106 games for the Cavs) and a pick that became Chad Kinch (41 career games) | Philadelphia trades the third pick (Tatum) and a first-rounder to Boston for the first pick (Markelle Fultz) | OKC trades James Harden, Cole Aldrich, Lazar Hayward and Daequan Cook to Houston for Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, two firsts (became Steven Adams and Mitch McGary) and a second (became Alex Abrines).