The Dallas Mavericks fired team president Nico Harrison on Tuesday, a development that was leaked to multiple reporters then confirmed in an open letter from Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont. This came together very quickly. The team is 3–8 after Monday’s home loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, and though the Mavs are beset by key injuries to Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving, it is impossible to ignore that the team’s roster is insanely out of whack, while 6-foot-9 rookie power forward Cooper Flagg is the team’s only dynamic ball-handler and has thus been assigned the role of point guard. The Mavericks have already lost at home to the Washington Wizards and New Orleans Pelicans, two of the league’s really profoundly shitty and dysfunctional teams. Dumont did not attend either of those losses; had he, he would’ve heard his home crowd chanting loudly for Harrison’s head. Dumont was in attendance Monday night, for the first time since the Mavericks were nuked at home in their season opener, and the chants boomed down during a disturbing late collapse. Half a day later, Harrison is a goner.
By one measure, Dumont picked a good night to make his non-triumphant return to a Mavs game. Flagg, Dallas’s hot-shot rookie, had a great game against the Bucks, posting a career-high 26 points on 15 shots, while stuck out of position and surrounded by mismatched supporting pieces. Flagg is terrific. Late in the game, with the Mavericks in the process of choking away a 13-point fourth-quarter lead, Flagg dribbled toward a screen on the right wing and the Bucks surrendered a defensive switch; the new defender, Gary Trent Jr., lunged to Flagg’s left, and the rookie immediately roasted him with a spin the other way, then drove directly at Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of the most intimidating defenders in the sport. For a second it looked like Flagg intended to attempt a dunk that surely would’ve reduced the building to rubble, but instead he muscled up and banked home a tough layup through contact to put the Mavericks up a point. It made for a bitchin’ topper on an extremely encouraging individual performance for a player who now carries the weight of this teetering franchise on his back.
The game’s climax—a squandered lead, sloppy mistakes down the stretch, and a fatal missed free throw inside of the game’s final two seconds—had the home crowd stunned and disgusted, and the presence of Dumont in a courtside seat refreshed their commitment to hectoring Harrison out of a job. Tim MacMahon of ESPN reported Monday night that Dumont’s faith in Harrison had waned through Dallas’s discouraging start to this campaign, to such a degree that Dumont involved himself personally in discussions about Davis’s timeline for return from a strained calf injury suffered back on Oct. 29. Davis, the centerpiece of Harrison’s trade of Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers last season, has now missed 30 of Dallas’s 44 regular-season games since the swap. The Mavericks have lost 22 of those 30 games; their only win sans Davis this season came against the dreadful Wizards, and required a late comeback.
The Mavs looked more competent in their loss to the Bucks, but it may be that Dumont was simply waiting for a loss to jettison Harrison. Monday night, he reportedly gave the first indications of buyer’s remorse on the Doncic trade, the legend of which continues to expand deliciously. According to Christian Clark of The Athletic, an 18-year-old fan named Nicholas Dickason, who’d flipped Dumont the bird in the season opener, used a quiet moment Monday night to simply claim an open seat next to Dumont and, while wearing a Lakers Luka Doncic jersey, apologize for his rude behavior. Dickason claims that he was rewarded with an apology of his own. “Basically Patrick was like, he feels horrible for the trade. And wants to make it up to us,” Dickason told Clark. By Tuesday morning, Marc Stein and Shams Charania were reporting that Harrison would not survive the day.
MacMahon told Brian Windhorst over the weekend that Harrison’s eventual firing had already become a fait accompli, citing Klay Thompson’s burdensome contract, D’Angelo Russell’s persistent awfulness, the team’s general incoherence, and “all the feces that’s flying around the Mavericks right now” as an accumulation of factors that had made Harrison’s position untenable. MacMahon, as sourced up a Mavs-watcher as there is, left open the possibility of a job-saving turnaround, but all that has happened in the hours since this scoop is a narrow loss to a playoff team, a repeat of a now-common “Fire Nico” chant, and one heart-to-heart with a remorseful teenager. Firing a general manager 11 games into a season is an extraordinarily weird maneuver for an NBA team, and suggests only a few possibilities: Either Harrison was deader all along than most observers believed, or the foundations of Dumont’s mind palace were truly rocked by the Dickason Affair.
If it’s the latter, then Harrison’s shitcanning strongly supports the Root Against Your Guys (RAYG) agenda. If it’s the former, sheesh, let that be a reminder that sports can be an appallingly nasty business: Empowering a middle manager to do something as apocalyptically unpopular as the Doncic trade, publicly echoing his justifications, which only twisted the knife, and then dangling the middle manager only long enough for him to become maximally saturated in the organization’s sins, would be a breathtakingly diabolical course of scapegoating. I am talking myself into the possibility that Dickason was a plant, the face of a false flag operation to humanize Dumont so that the owner can remain standing while Harrison is hounded out of the business.
This is very far from a normal transaction. The Mavericks are doing a whole public relations campaign: The precise timing of Harrison’s termination was leaked ahead of time, and Dumont’s open letter was ready to fire. Before the firing was even official, Charania had reported not only who will take over personnel responsibilities in Dallas—assistant general manager and UT Tyler grad Matt Riccardi and beloved former Maverick Michael Finley—but what time today they would ascend into their new roles. Dumont wants his organization washed of accountability for the Doncic trade, but will settle for temporarily slaking the bloodlust of his team’s home crowd. It’s shaping up to be a rough season in Dallas; Monday night was not the last time Mavericks fans will feel the pain of the franchise having chased off one of the sport’s best players. If Dumont intends to attend any more of his team’s home games, he should prepare himself for the crowd having picked out another, even worthier, target.
