Nico Harrison has made some high-visibility trades and acquisitions since becoming the Dallas Mavericks GM in 2021. When you’re attempting to build a quality team that can position itself for a title, bold and conspicuous operations are generally the necessary occurrences that fans want to see. And the last few years have seen more of those occurrences than at any previous period in Mavericks team history.
Yes, but… Nico Harrison’s ability to engage and execute on those high-profile personnel maneuvers, it must be noted in a footnote to an asterisk, would not have been possible had he not inherited a Mavericks team already possessing Slovenian sensation Luka Doncic on its roster. If playing the role of GM has been something of a game for this white-collared, crackerjack salesman, the unique situation he stumbled into could be likened to substituting into a game of Monopoly for the person who had already taken painstaking efforts to acquire the requisite capital to subsequently build and maintain highly valuable real estate on Park Place and Boardwalk.
And rather than allow those investments time to suffocate the remaining competition, Nico made the decidedly curious point to reengineer his adopted player profile into his own image. In my estimation, this desire was due to one of two factors. Either he possesses a strong sense of self-determination and an innate drive to earn his keep, or else his insecurities outpace his ambitions and make him prone to capricious eruptions of pseudo-self affirmations.
Nico’s “vision” of the 2025-26 Dallas Mavericks is entirely the result of his having had one of the greatest young players of all time at his disposal, the Rolls Royce without which he would have been limited to dealing in used cars and parts up to this point, to draw a metaphor. Under these circumstances, the fact that Harrison has alluded to this vision of his on multiple occasions since the trade that sent Doncic to the Lakers seems to provide a path for deeper interpretation of his behavior and helps trace the particular origins of this self-congratulatory act of his into two clear psychological catalysts.
The first and most obvious pain point for Nico is that he’s well aware that he made a critical mistake, from an organizational standpoint, by selling the Doncic trade to team owner, Miriam Adelson, and shareholding governor, Patrick Dumont. And like anyone with a public personality who has royally screwed up in front of god and man, he has since then been running a big smoke and mirrors campaign. He demonstrates a clear need to sell his actions as justifiable. Immediately after the trade, he utilized subtle media sabotage to make Doncic out to be a hindrance to winning basketball, artfully crafting a narrative friendly to his undertaking.
But Harrison might have expected the blowback he’d receive after executing such a backbreaking move for the franchise’s longterm future. As such, there’s almost no other explanation for his resolve in the discharging of that plan than the probability that he was jealous of Doncic’s status. Luka is charismatic; he’s aggressively boisterous on the court and he’s unapologetic about it. He’s a top 5 player in the league and he has a mouth on him, for better or worse. Harrison could never outshine someone like that, and he likely felt his own authority undermined as a result. With Doncic as the face of the franchise, Nico Harrison would never be more than an afterthought. Without Doncic, in a certain lens, Nico could be the potential mastermind of a dynasty.
It’s about attention, is my point. He’s attempting to employ a sleight of hand here to make it appear as if it were Nico Harrison’s otherworldly talent that brought together Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis, and some other very high-level role players. But if anything should be said about Nico Harrison, it’s this: he is nothing without Luka Doncic.
The Mavericks don’t have Irving on their team without Doncic already being there. And without that, subsequent key acquisitions then become less likely, if only because those maneuvers would not be aligned with the team’s growing championship aspirations that resulted from pairing Irving and Doncic. Acquisitions like Gafford, PJ, and Klay fall into that category. And it doesn’t need any explanation to demonstrate how they wouldn’t have Anthony Davis on the team without Doncic. I won’t get into the luck of the draw with the great fortune they needed to be handed the first overall selection in the NBA Draft which netted them Cooper Flagg. All I do know, now, is that Nico Harrison is conniving, rather than just plain shrewd, and he’s a shameless fraud, rather than a savvy businessman (or he’s at least an equal mixture of the latter two).
Mark Cuban said Nico “took a lot of heat” for everything that went down last season. I think he’s gotten off rather easy, to be honest. The very nature of the news these days makes people forget about last week pretty quickly. Whatever success this (potentially) very talented team does have in the near future, it should not be attributed to the distorted story of Harrison’s gifts as a visionary general manager. For the sake of accuracy, it should be remembered that Nico Harrison, the Dallas GM, is only possible because of Luka Doncic, the Dallas superstar player. The Maverick’s entire roster, as currently constructed, would be nowhere near its level of star power if not for Doncic’s presence. He is the gravitational singularity that brought all of this together. I’ve been a Mavericks fan since the early 1990’s. Dallas has never been able to facilitate big name acquisitions. So what changed? Oh right, Nico arrived with his grand vision and ultra-savvy prowess as a facilitator.
No, Nico Harrison is a spiteful, attention-seeking man whose only claim to fame is making his rich bosses look incompetent – in front of the entire world – on their first day in the office. Now there’s something I wish I could do. Their response? Raising ticket prices by 8 percent.
Of course!