{"id":323721,"date":"2026-06-05T06:40:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/323721\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T06:40:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T06:40:19","slug":"mark-cuban-dirk-nowitzki-didnt-agree-with-mavs-nico-harrison-hire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/323721\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Cuban: Dirk Nowitzki &#8216;didn&#8217;t agree&#8217; with Mavs&#8217; Nico Harrison hire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Cuban revealed that Dirk\u00a0Nowitzki wasn\u2019t on board with his decision to hire Nico Harrison, the architect of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dallasnews.com\/sports\/mavericks\/2026\/01\/31\/is-this-real-an-oral-history-of-the-luka-doncic-trade-one-year-later\/\" data-link=\"native\" class=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the infamous Luka Doncic trade<\/a>, as the team\u2019s general manager in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Dirk was like, &#8216;yeah, I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s the way to go,&#8217; so to his credit, he called it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cuban hired Harrison, a former vice president at Nike with no NBA front office experience, while he was still the majority owner of the team. In his role at Nike, Harrison had forged relationships with numerous star players, something Cuban hoped the Mavericks could leverage in free agency.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI explained to [Nowitzki] that I needed somebody who had relationships with players already, and that was what we were missing, that was our weak suit,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cWe hadn&#8217;t had all that much success on luring top-notch free agents.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Under Harrison\u2019s watch, the Mavericks made a trip to the Western Conference finals in 2022 and to the NBA Finals in 2024, but lost goodwill with fans after the trade of Doncic.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Harrison traded\u00a0Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 1, 2025 for Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round pick.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201c[Harrison] knew [Davis] from the time he was 13,\u201d Cuban said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Cuban revealed that Dirk\u00a0Nowitzki wasn\u2019t on board with his decision to hire Nico Harrison, the architect of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,88840,88841,115761,88905,90064],"class_list":["post-323721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-dallas-mavericks","tag-tp-luka-doncic","tag-tp-dirk-nowitzki","tag-tp-mark-cuban","tag-tp-nico-harrison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}