Chaos in Dallas: The Post-Doncic Era and the Fight for Power in the Mavericks
The Dallas Mavericks team, mired in a losing streak and in the midst of a deep crisis that shook the franchise for nine months, was on the court at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C. The situation was complicated: hours earlier, the Mavs had been surpassed by the Memphis team. Added to this were delays in the buses that were to transport the team to the hotel. After an hour, the first bus arrived. The exhausted players boarded to go to the Four Seasons in Georgetown, arriving after 3 a.m. ET. They were hoping for encouraging news the next day, as the return of Anthony Davis, their big star, was scheduled for that date, as planned by their medical team and former general manager Nico Harrison, after a calf injury. However, plans changed the following afternoon, hours before the game against the Washington Wizards. Mavs governor Patrick Dumont intervened to postpone Davis’s return, following the advice of the team’s director of health and performance, Johann Bilsborough, who warned of the risk of aggravating the injury. This was the first time Dumont had been directly involved in the day-to-day basketball operations since acquiring a majority stake in the team in December 2023. This was also a clear sign of the disintegration of the trust Dumont had in Harrison, a trust that had been so strong the previous season that Dumont approved the most controversial trade in NBA history without seeking other opinions. Davis’s availability at that time was considered day-to-day, as was Harrison’s job stability. Three days later, Dumont fired Harrison. This event marked the culmination of the most tumultuous era in Mavericks history, fueled by clashing egos, a controversial team sale, the transfer of the franchise’s most emblematic star, and a silent but intense power struggle between the former owner and the general manager he had hired. In the future, Dumont and his new basketball team, which again includes former majority owner Mark Cuban, plan to focus on the future with Cooper Flagg, the first draft pick, a generational talent. According to team sources, the Mavs, with a 4-11 record and out of the playoff spots in the Western Conference, will also explore the trade market for Davis, a key player in the Luka Doncic deal, before this season’s deadline. In the midst of this situation, questions arise about Mark Cuban’s role and his influence on the team, especially after the sale of his majority stake. Discussions with internal sources reveal a struggle for influence between Cuban and Harrison, both seeking the backing of the new and experienced owner, Dumont. On November 11, this power struggle reached a critical point, with consequences for all involved.“Mark has been trying a coup for months.”
Team Source
Minutes later, Cuban gathered the players, coaching staff, and front office personnel in the locker room to convey a similar message. “Nothing is going to change. I’m still in charge of basketball,” he told them before facing the Cleveland Cavaliers. However, in the room, the message was not well received. Several sources considered Cuban’s comments to be disrespectful to Harrison, who was in his third season as president of basketball operations and general manager of the Mavs. Throughout the organization, it was known that Harrison’s freedom to perform his duties had fluctuated depending on Cuban’s decision to take the reins. Now, in front of the players and staff, Cuban had minimized the power of the general manager he had hired almost three years earlier. Days later, Dumont made his first visit to Dallas since the sale. He held separate meetings with the franchise’s administrative staff, the basketball operations department, and the players. In the last two sessions, he was asked directly about Cuban’s claim to maintain authority in basketball. Dumont’s response contradicted his new business partner. “Mark is a friend. I will consult him from time to time. But make no mistake: I am the team governor and I make the decisions,” Dumont said, according to multiple sources. Dumont’s directive was a relief to many, including Harrison and coach Jason Kidd, who often felt frustrated by what they perceived as Cuban’s unproductive interference in personnel decisions, according to internal sources within the organization. This also created a power vacuum that Harrison took advantage of to fill. A trip to the Finals that season, with the help of a couple of deals at the trade deadline that yielded immediate results, provided Dumont with enough evidence to trust Harrison’s brilliance in basketball. Two weeks later, before Game 4 of the NBA Finals, Dumont held the only press conference he has held since the transfer of ownership. He was flanked by Harrison and then-Mavs CEO Cynt Marshall. “Normally, when teams change ownership, they bring in their own people,” Harrison said. “Patrick and the Adelson family, they have adopted me as one of their own, so I really appreciate it. One of the things about Patrick and me, in our conversations, we talk about leadership. We talk about investing in the community. We talk about culture. Those are all the things I believe in. It reminds me of my old days at Nike.” “I guess that’s your corporate background.” He turned his head towards Dumont. Their eyes met as wide smiles appeared on their faces. “Sounds great,” Dumont said, grinning from ear to ear. Unlike his predecessor, Dumont does not revel in the public eye’s glare. Cuban reveled in the fame that comes with owning an NBA team, transforming his image from a pompous businessman into a long-running role on ABC’s Shark Tank that elevated his celebrity far beyond the sports world. By contrast, a Google search yielded only one photograph of Dumont when news of the Mavs sale broke. The corporate world is Dumont’s comfort zone, who obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School before starting his investment banking career more than a quarter of a century ago. He has climbed the corporate ladder since joining Las Vegas Sands after his marriage in 2009 to Sivan Ochshorn, the daughter of the corporation’s owners, Miriam and (since deceased) Sheldon Adelson, becoming president and chief operating officer in 2021. Harrison, who rose from field representative to vice president of basketball operations for North America during his two decades at Nike, prioritized developing a relationship with Dumont after the franchise was purchased. Harrison connected with his new boss by speaking a kind of corporate language, emphasizing the importance of establishing a clear chain of command by reporting directly to Dumont instead of through Cuban, as he had done for the previous two seasons. Both Harrison and Cuban declined to comment for this story.“That’s how Cuban overvalues himself because he always has a microphone in front of him,”
Team Source
With a new direct line to his boss and the previous one out of the picture, Harrison accelerated the isolation. Harrison had once told Cuban that he was nicknamed “The Silent Assassin” at Nike because of his ability to quietly maneuver to get his way in business matters. Suddenly, Cuban believed he was in Harrison’s crosshairs. “Immediately after the sale, Nico really started playing with Dumont”, Source from the team Cuban blamed Harrison, not Dumont, for his exile from basketball, according to sources familiar with the dynamics. As Harrison’s power increased, Cuban privately claimed that the league office demanded the parties remove a clause from the purchase agreement that guaranteed him the right to be invited to and attend all basketball operations meetings, sources said. That clause, however, did not mention that Cuban had any authority over basketball operations. In Cuban’s mind, according to a source, he would have maintained control essentially because he would have been the smartest and most experienced man in the room.“Nico basically said: ‘Dude, I don’t want to deal with Mark anymore. It’s too much,'”
Team source
As far as Cuban is concerned, according to sources familiar with his way of thinking, Harrison was not qualified to be the main decision-maker for the team’s basketball operations, despite having hired him in June 2021 to be the team’s general manager after the controversial firing of the Mavs’ long-time president of basketball operations, Donnie Nelson. Even so, Cuban privately insisted that he never intended to give Harrison autonomy and hired him in the hope that his relationships with players and agents would help the Mavs reverse their long trend of finishing as runners-up in free agency. Cuban hired former Utah Jazz general manager Dennis Lindsey as a senior advisor in the summer of 2023, a move suggested by Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, and business manager Lara Beth Seager, to help mask Harrison’s perceived shortcomings as an inexperienced NBA executive. Harrison blamed Cuban for what he believed were the Mavs’ biggest personnel mistakes during his tenure, which occurred in the summer of 2022: letting Jalen Brunson walk in free agency and signing Christian Wood, a player Kidd didn’t want to coach and regretted having on the roster. Several members of the coaching staff and front office also blamed Cuban for those decisions. Harrison insisted in conversations with Dumont that the basketball operations department would function much better without Cuban’s constant interference, sources said. Dumont believed he had a proof of concept after the Mavs’ 2023-24 season took off following the deals at the trade deadline to acquire Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington, although only after the Washington Wizards allowed Kyle Kuzma to veto a deal in which Dallas would have given up a pair of first-round picks for him, forcing the Mavericks to pivot to other targets. Dallas had a 28-23 record and occupied eighth place in the West, two games out of fifth place, when Harrison’s new additions joined the team. The Mavs had the best record in the league (16-4) and the top-ranked defense in the last 20 regular season games before their run through the West as the number 5 seed. That was all the ammunition Harrison needed to convince Dumont of his prowess as a personnel decision-maker.“That is the most obvious instance of having my cake and eating it too”,
Source involved in the process
Dumont occasionally asked Harrison to “keep Mark in line” regarding discussions and decisions about personnel, sources said. Harrison would agree to do so before ignoring it. Contact at this point between Cuban and Dumont was minimal, given the team’s success. Cuban and Harrison rarely spoke to each other.“Nico did a great sales job”,
Mavs Official
Harrison became increasingly isolated, his direct line to Dumont was a source of power. Sources throughout the franchise believed that Harrison would tell Dumont what his boss wanted him to know, not necessarily everything Dumont needed to know, especially as a newcomer to the NBA.“Nico built the moat and raised the fence and said: ‘I’ll take care of this!'”
Source familiar with the dynamic between Harrison and Dumont
“The only guy in basketball operations who had a direct line to Dumont wasn’t giving him the scoop,”
One of the team’s sources
This is how Harrison positioned himself to persuade Dumont to approve the Doncic trade, a deal considered illogical by rival executives for a variety of reasons, from parting with a perennial MVP contender in his prime without any threat of a trade request, to receiving what was widely perceived as poor value in return. Harrison built his case from a business perspective. Doncic would be eligible to sign a five-year, $345 million supermax contract extension in the summer. That deal would be a terrible investment, Harrison told Dumont, pointing out concerns about Doncic’s physical condition, bad habits off the court, and recurring calf problems, predicting that his body would break down.
Doncic and Harrison’s team had several disagreements regarding the recovery process of the calf strain that sidelined the superstar at the time, which the general manager presented to Dumont as proof that Doncic was not fully committed to the Mavs. Harrison also blamed Doncic’s defensive struggles for the Mavs’ elimination in five games against the Boston Celtics in the Finals. He proposed to Dumont his vision of building the best defense in the league around Davis, whom Harrison had been close to since Davis was a teenager playing on the AAU circuit. “Defense wins championships,” Harrison repeatedly said in his few attempts to publicly explain the logic of the trade. Harrison also convinced Dumont that discussions about the transfer should be kept contained, minimizing the risk of them leaking to the media, which could have resulted in Duffy, Doncic’s agent, using his influence to cancel the deal. Including Cuban would likely have caused a leak, Harrison told Dumont. Nobody else knew. Nobody else needed to know. Dumont bought it, and that was all that mattered.“‘We trusted Nico’ —too much at the end of the day”
Source
During halftime of the Mavs game on November 10 against the Milwaukee Bucks, the night before Harrison was fired, Dumont welcomed an 18-year-old man wearing a golden Doncic Lakers jersey to sit next to him for several minutes. Nicholas Dickason approached Dumont at the behest of his father, he told The Athletic, to apologize for giving him the finger during the season-opening loss to the San Antonio Spurs, the only previous game the governor had attended this regular season. During their cordial conversation, Dumont expressed his remorse for the Doncic deal, Dickason said. After the game, a surreal home defeat that included the team squandering a 13-point lead in the final quarter and the thundering chants of “Fire Nico!” during the Mavericks’ free throws, Cuban made a route from his usual seat next to the home bench to meet with Dumont next to his seat near mid-court on the other side of the American Airlines Center.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the court, Harrison went down the portable stairs next to his seat and entered the tunnel, the bitter power struggle that had affected the Mavericks for years changing in real time. Harrison, who received death threats after Doncic’s transfer, never returned to his usual previous seat among the four reserved for the officials of the Mavs’ front office in the lower stands in front of the team bench. He stayed in that mid-court tunnel during the games for the rest of last season, accompanied by security. He rolled those stairs before each game this season, allowing him to access and leave his new seat a few rows behind the local broadcast table without crossing paths with the fans.
A few months after the trade that would ultimately condemn his time with the Mavericks, Harrison and the team were fortunate enough to obtain the first pick in the 2025 draft. It was then, several team sources said, that Cuban’s push to fire Harrison accelerated. Harrison then managed to further infuriate the fanbase after the team selected Cooper Flagg, the consensus No. 1 pick, at the end of June. “Fortune favors the bold,” said Harrison, a nod to a fanbase that was neither ready nor willing to receive him. Weeks earlier, amid the widespread backlash across the city that threatened the franchise’s future viability, Dumont had urged Harrison to undergo media training, hoping to craft a message that would soothe some of the self-inflicted wounds. The lessons apparently didn’t work. A couple of days later, at Flagg’s introductory press conference, Harrison said he hoped fans “were starting to see my vision,” further angering fans at a time when the luck of getting Flagg and the excitement of a future with him should have been celebrated. Four months later, with the Mavs in 14th place in the West amid predictable struggles and the fans’ anguish weighing heavily on the players, Dumont had had enough. The dynamic between Dumont and Cuban never became confrontational, sources on both sides said. They had known each other for years, forming a friendship that served as the basis for the franchise’s sale negotiations. Those same sources said Cuban reinforced his credibility with Dumont with criticisms of Harrison’s roster construction over the summer that quickly proved to be painfully accurate. Cuban had warned Dumont that Dallas would have a terrible offense due to the lack of dribble and shot creators. Harrison downplayed those concerns. The Mavs are second-to-last in the league in offense. “I understand the profound impact these difficult past months have had,” Dumont wrote in a letter to fans published that afternoon, vaguely referencing Doncic’s transfer in his only public comments this season. “Please know that I am fully committed to the success of the Mavericks. Thank you for your support, thank you for holding us accountable, and thank you for your passion and your patience. You deserve transparency and a team that reflects your spirit.” Cuban has strongly suggested replacing Harrison with Lindsey, now the second-highest ranking member of the Detroit Pistons’ front office, Eastern leaders, sources said. Lindsey is likely to be considered during a comprehensive search process that will include external and internal candidates, but for the moment, Dumont has opted for a “general manager by committee” approach. That committee, which could still be in place until this season’s trade deadline, met with Dumont to discuss potential strategic scenarios on the afternoon of Harrison’s dismissal. Assistant general managers Michael Finley and Matt Riccardi, recently promoted to interim co-general managers, were in the room. So was Kidd, who has as much influence as anyone in the organization after signing a contract extension during the preseason. Cuban was also there, an indication of his return to the franchise’s inner circle. Cuban is excited to be part of the small group that Dumont trusts to educate him about the NBA business and guide him through a turbulent time. “He’s walking on air right now,” said a team source. “Cuban is floating in his Skechers.” But Cuban is not returning to his status as a decision-maker within the Mavs. Nor will he ever. As one source said, Cuban sold that right. “He’s a consultant, not a decision-maker,” said another source. “But he’s at the table.” Even so, no one knows how long he will stay there, nor how far his influence will reach. Those decisions, according to a source informed by Dumont, will be made by the person who replaces the man who has just been fired.
