Oh, how seductive it must have been.<\/p>\n
You buy a basketball team. Months later, you are standing at midcourt in Minnesota holding the Western Conference Finals trophy. Cameras catch your face. For one dangerous second you cannot help but think: is this what owning a sports franchise is like?<\/p>\n
A few days later, the confetti is falling in Boston, and it belongs to someone else. Even worse, you are months away from being hoodwinked into believing that being on the business end of the NBA version of the Babe Ruth trade<\/a> is a good idea. Soon, boos will serenade you in your home arena<\/a> as even marginally adept lip readers will notice you ask your associate, \u201cAre they booing\u2026me?\u201d Oh, they were.<\/p>\n That has been the painful, expensive education of Patrick Dumont. Buying a basketball team and understanding the NBA are not mutually inclusive, a line I wrote in November when Nico Harrison was finally fired<\/a>. The new Mavericks governor inherited Mark Cuban\u2019s human Rolodex hire and trusted the man\u2019s confidence over the man\u2019s competence. By the time Dumont understood the magnitude of what he had been bamboozled into signing off on by Harrison, the trade had already happened, and the booing had already started. A few rocky months later, an 18-year-old SMU freshman in a Luka Lakers jersey was sitting four rows behind him at the American Airlines Center, waiting to apologize.<\/p>\n What Dumont did at that game, on November 10 of last year, was admit he had been wrong. To a kid named Nicholas Dickason<\/a>, who had flipped him off on opening night and come back to make it right. \u201cSometimes you have good intentions and you make mistakes. We all do it.\u201d Dumont also told Dickason, according to The Athletic<\/a>, that he \u201cfeels horrible for the trade\u201d and \u201cwants to make it up to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Nico Harrison was fired the next morning.<\/p>\n I\u2019m tired of writing about Nico Harrison.<\/p>\n Nobody at this site has taken him apart more often, with more long-winded metaphors<\/a>, than I have. Fifteen months of column work spent litigating a single trade and a single regime, and I\u2019d like to be done.<\/p>\n I have not been part of the move-on crowd. I have been part of the driving-with-the-brakes-on<\/a> crowd. The people who understood that the Adelson-Dumont ownership group is not selling the team, that some of the faces tied to the trade were going to remain, and that the reset many fans wanted was not coming on their preferred timetable.<\/p>\n Tuesday, for the first time, a brighter horizon actually felt possible when the Mavericks introduced Masai Ujiri as the team\u2019s new president of basketball operations and alternate governor.<\/p>\n Not because Patrick Dumont sold the team. Because Dumont brought in someone whose entire career has been the photographic negative of the man he replaced. Someone whose first instinct in front of a microphone was to acknowledge what happened, name the wound, and offer a path forward that did not pretend the wound was imagined.<\/p>\n The pivot is straightforward: Patrick Dumont trusted the schmoozer. Now he is trusting the scout.<\/p>\n When the Rolodex was the resume<\/p>\n When Mark Cuban hired Nico Harrison alongside Jason Kidd in 2021, he was hiring a Rolodex.<\/p>\n After years of striking out in free agency, Cuban ostensibly convinced himself that the missing ingredient at the top of his front office was relationships. Connections. Access. Harrison had been at Nike for two decades. He had the cell phone numbers of every star in the league. He had brokered deals with Kobe and Curry and Kyrie and Durant. He could schmooze. That was the pitch.<\/p>\n The problem, as the Mavericks would learn the hard way, is that schmoozing was a job where Harrison could not lose.<\/p>\n At Nike, even if you flubbed a star\u2019s pitch meeting (the famous Steph Curry \/ Under Armour story comes to mind<\/a>), there was always another superstar coming through the door. Nike does not compete with 29 other shoe companies for a fixed pool of talent. The next star would always be there, ready to be courted. Failure in Harrison\u2019s previous job was, in the most consequential sense, impossible.<\/p>\n The NBA front office is a different planet. You compete against 29 other teams. Talent evaluation is the entire job. Many of the men who become NBA general managers spent years grinding as scouts before they ever sat in a draft room with veto power, watching gym after gym, mapping international tournaments, building the eye that eventually recognizes a hidden gem and the spine to take the swing. Harrison did none of that. He was a shoe rep with the keys to a basketball empire.<\/p>\n The results came on schedule. \u201cOne team source recalls a document where Harrison placed Jrue Holiday within the same trade target tier as Nikola Joki\u0107,\u201d Tim Cato reported at DLLS Sports last fall<\/a>. Read that sentence again. A real general manager does not put Jrue Holiday and Nikola Joki\u0107 in the same tier of trade targets. A schmoozer does, because the difference between Holiday \u2014 a decorated guard whose best version was already behind him \u2014 and the generational Joker does not exist in the world of brand partnerships.<\/p>\n That blindness explains the Anthony Davis trade. Davis had appeared on Harrison\u2019s Instagram a decade earlier, dousing him with ice water during the ALS Challenge. That version of Davis, the prime All-Star Davis of 2014, is the one Harrison saw when he looked at the trade assets on the Lakers roster. The brittle 30-something Davis who would play 29 regular-season games across two partial Mavericks seasons before being salary-dumped to Washington for spare parts? That Davis was invisible. Harrison saw the friend, frozen in time.<\/p>\n The Mavericks never endured the kind of long, semi-intentional wilderness years that let a franchise stockpile picks between eras. The Mavs leaned into asset-burning to build around Don\u010di\u0107. By 2025, Luka qualified for the supermax. The supermax would have given Don\u010di\u0107 more money than any player in NBA history, along with the institutional power that comes with that contract. That power would have made Luka virtually impervious to Harrison\u2019s outsized need for control. So Harrison did the boldest thing a schmoozer driven by ego can do. He traded the king before the king could outrank him.<\/p>\n \u201cThe easiest thing for me to do is nothing,\u201d Harrison told reporters at the Cleveland press conference the day after the trade. \u201cEveryone would praise me for doing nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n He could not stand to be praised for doing nothing. He needed his shining moment. He needed his real-life PlayStation move. He needed to prove that he, the shoe executive, was the architect of a championship and not a passenger in the Luka Don\u010di\u0107 era.<\/p>\n Ujiri did not arrive at Tuesday\u2019s introductory press conference from a cushy industry job. He arrived from the gym.<\/p>\n Ujiri\u2019s career began as an unpaid scout in 2002, working for the Orlando Magic and the Denver Nuggets. Kiki Vandeweghe and Jeff Weltman hired him onto salary at Denver. The Dallas connections in that scouting tree are real. Amadou Gallo Fall, a longtime Mavericks scout and director, was Ujiri\u2019s friend and mentor, and Ujiri name-checked Fall, Donnie Nelson, and Vandeweghe in his opening remarks Tuesday. The braid back to the Mavs predates this hire by twenty years.<\/p>\n To become a scout, Ujiri had to outwork other scouts. To become an assistant general manager, he had to outwork other scouts who had also outworked other scouts. To become an executive vice president and general manager of the Denver Nuggets in 2010, he had to demonstrate, year over year, that his hits on Kenneth Faried and Wilson Chandler and the post-Melo Nuggets roster he helped assemble were not luck. They were the work born of a process started years earlier, before the accolades.<\/p>\n The work paid off. In 2013, Ujiri was named NBA Executive of the Year, the only non-American ever to win the award. The Nuggets won 57 games that season, the most in the franchise\u2019s NBA history. Then he went on to Toronto and built another contender from what remained of the Bargnani-era roster he inherited. And in 2018, he made one of the riskiest moves any general manager has ever made. He traded the longest-tenured Raptor and franchise face DeMar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard, a one-year rental of a two-way superstar coming off an injury-marred season and a public divorce from the Spurs.<\/p>\n It worked. The Raptors won the 2019 championship. Kawhi left as a free agent that summer. Ujiri\u2019s team played the long game and the short game in the same window, and won both.<\/p>\n The recent Toronto stretch was not pristine. The OG Anunoby trade for RJ Barrett did not yield what Ujiri wanted. The Quickley extension was rich. The Ingram trade looked desperate. The Collin Murray-Boyles draft pick is still developing. No executive bats a thousand, and the latter years in Toronto were the years when the puzzle around Ujiri stopped giving him pieces to put together.<\/p>\n But a championship can keep an executive in a chair past the point where the chair still fits. The Mavericks learned that lesson with the waning years of Donnie Nelson\u2019s tenure. For Ujiri, the fit in Toronto ran long. Twelve years. Five Atlantic Division titles. Two Eastern Conference Finals appearances. One NBA championship that almost no one outside the team\u2019s own building saw coming.<\/p>\n What Dallas needed and now has are the fresh eyes of a seasoned, unsentimental evaluator with the power to evoke real change. Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving were spoken of mythologically by Nico Harrison. I do not get that sense from Masai Ujiri. He has shown, throughout his career, that he can attach to players without becoming attached to them. He can pull the trigger on a trade when the math says pull the trigger, even if the trade is for a one-year rental who might not re-sign, even if the trade involves moving the most beloved player on the roster.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope to bring calm,\u201d Ujiri said early in his opening remarks Tuesday. \u201cI hope to bring to this place winning.\u201d<\/p>\n The first half of that sentence is more important than it sounds. Calm has not been a recurring feature of the Mavericks\u2019 recent operating environment. The Harrison era was a blender. Opaque decision-making, late-night trades, manufactured dysfunction narratives served to ownership in private while the actual roster was being built around a generational player. Calm is the antidote.<\/p>\n It is also a tonal philosophy. Watch how Ujiri handled the inevitable Luka questions Tuesday. Asked twice (once about a healing process, once about whether he would have made the trade), Ujiri did not throw his new boss under the bus. He did not call the trade a mistake. He also did not pretend the wound was not there.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a healing process with that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n And then he gave the franchise something it had not been given by anyone in the organization since that fateful Shams bomb on a cold February night. A frame.<\/p>\n \u201cLuka is a Hall of Famer, a future Hall of Famer, and that\u2019s the past. I always say in Africa, we say when kings go, kings come, and a king went, and we have a little prince here that we\u2019re going to turn into a king.\u201d<\/p>\n That is a culturally specific framing that does real work on the grief. The throne is not empty. The loss is real. The path forward is the prince, and the prince is right there in the building, 19 years old and newly minted Rookie of the Year.<\/p>\n The Harrison version of this answer (and the Jason Kidd version, which I wrote about at length on Easter Sunday<\/a>) was a clipped we have to move on, with the unstated insistence that there was nothing to see here, that the trade was good, that the fans were the problem for refusing to get over it. Ujiri eventually got there too, saying \u201cwe really have to move on,\u201d but only after giving the grief oxygen first. He gave fans permission to mourn what was lost and a structure for walking toward what comes next. Different operating system entirely.<\/p>\n That is what calm looks like in practice. Acknowledgment plus forward motion.<\/p>\n There is a quote you should know about, if you do not already.<\/p>\n The date was April 19, 2014. The location was Maple Leaf Square in Toronto, where thousands of Raptors fans had gathered for a rally before Game 1 of the Eastern Conference first round against the Brooklyn Nets. The Raptors\u2019 relatively new general manager, fresh off his Executive of the Year award in Denver, took the stage. He grabbed the microphone. He shouted \u201cF*** Brooklyn!\u201d at the assembled crowd.<\/a><\/p>\n The NBA fined him $25,000. He later said he was not taking it back, and that if the Raptors got the rematch he would say it again.<\/p>\n The head coach of the Brooklyn Nets at the time was asked for his response.<\/p>\n \u201cYou gotta tell me who the GM is,\u201d Jason Kidd said. \u201cI don\u2019t even know who their GM is.\u201d<\/p>\n This historical wrinkle matters because it tells you something about the dynamic Kidd is walking into. Asked about Kidd\u2019s future Tuesday, Ujiri did exactly what he should have done. He praised Kidd as a Hall of Fame player. He said Kidd had done a great job. He referenced his own track record of keeping inherited coaches: George Karl in Denver for three years, Dwane Casey in Toronto for five. Both were inherited. Both were eventually replaced. Read between the lines if you wish, or do not. Either reading lands you in the same place.<\/p>\n What Ujiri did not do was endorse Kidd as the Mavericks\u2019 coach. He could have. He could have said the obvious thing: that Kidd is a Hall of Fame player, that he took this team to the Finals, that Cooper Flagg\u2019s relationship with him is real and worth preserving. Instead, Ujiri said: \u201c\u2026we\u2019re going to look at this thing from head to toe.\u201d<\/p>\n That is the right answer. For too long, Kidd\u2019s halo as a Hall of Fame player and his 2024 Finals run insulated him from a dispassionate evaluation. His Dallas regular-season record finished this season hovering around .500 across five years, with three lottery-bound seasons in five. His best playoff outcomes came when he had the second-best player on the planet running the offense.<\/p>\n