P.J. Washington

After speaking to more than a dozen sources within the Mavericks‘ organization, Tim MacMahon of ESPN took a deep dive today into the events that led up to Nico Harrison‘s dismissal as the team’s head of basketball operations last week, painting a detailed picture of a long-running power struggle between Harrison and minority owner Mark Cuban.

As MacMahon outlines, Cuban hired Harrison as Dallas’ president of basketball operations and general manager back in 2021, when Cuban was still the team’s majority owner and had the final say on basketball decisions. After Cuban sold control of the franchise to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont in late 2023, he maintained a 27% stake in the team and hoped to continue running the basketball operations department too, but quickly found himself pushed out of the inner circle.

“Mark is a friend. I will consult him from time to time,” Dumont said during a basketball operations meeting after taking over as the Mavericks’ governor, according to MacMahon’s sources. “But make no mistake about this: I’m the governor of the team and I am making decisions.”

Sources inside the organization tell MacMahon that Dumont’s announcement was a welcome one to many people in the organization, including Harrison and head coach Jason Kidd, who were “often frustrated by what they perceived as Cuban’s frequently unproductive meddling in personnel decisions.”

However, sources familiar with Cuban’s thinking tell ESPN that he never meant for Harrison to have full autonomy on basketball decisions and that he didn’t believe the former Nike executive was qualified to be making those decisions, having hired him due to his relationships with players and agents. During Harrison’s first couple years with the team, Cuban still had to sign off on any personnel moves the Mavs made, while veteran executive Dennis Lindsey was brought in to “help mask Harrison’s perceived shortcomings as an inexperienced NBA executive,” MacMahon writes.

After Harrison became the Mavericks’ primary basketball decision-maker and Lindsey left for a job in Detroit, Cuban sought to regain some of the control he had lost. He now once again has Dumont’s ear in the wake of Harrison’s ouster.

“Mark’s been trying a palace coup for months,” a team source told ESPN.

Here are more highlights from MacMahon’s report:

• After Dumont took over as the Mavs’ governor, Harrison began reporting directly to him instead of going through Cuban, as he sought to “ice out” the former majority owner. “Nico basically said, ‘Dude, I don’t want to deal with Mark anymore. He’s too much,” a team source told ESPN.
• According to MacMahon, Harrison blamed Cuban for some of the Mavs’ biggest roster-related missteps in recent years, including losing Jalen Brunson and trading for Christian Wood, a player Kidd “didn’t want to coach.” Other members of the coaching staff and front office also blamed Cuban for those moves, MacMahon writes, adding that Harrison made the case to the new ownership group that the front office would function better without Cuban’s involvement.
• Harrison strengthened that case by making savvy deals for P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford at the 2024 trade deadline and getting the Mavs to the NBA Finals, according to MacMahon, who notes that those deals only materialized after a trade sending two first-round picks to Washington for Kyle Kuzma fell through. “Nico did a hell of a sales job,” a Mavs official told ESPN. “He took credit for everything that was done. When Patrick asked questions — asked how we got Kyrie (Irving), how the draft happened, etc. — (Harrison) said he was the guy. We got on a roll and went to the Finals. Fool’s gold.”
• While Dumont asked Harrison to keep Cuban in the fold, Harrison didn’t always do so — he and Cuban were communicating less and less after the sale, according to MacMahon. “Nico built the moat and put up the fence and said, ‘I got this!'” one source familiar with the situation told ESPN. Sources also said that Harrison was telling Dumont what he wanted the team governor to know, rather than everything Dumont needed to know. “The one guy in basketball ops who had a pipeline to Dumont wasn’t giving him the straight scoop,” a source said.
• Having fully gained Dumont’s trust, Harrison sold him on February’s Luka Doncic blockbuster, making the case that committing to the star guard on a super-max contract worth a projected $345MM would be a bad investment due to conditioning concerns and recurring calf injuries, per MacMahon. At the time, Harrison and Doncic’s camp weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the recovery process for his latest calf strain, which Harrison portrayed to Dumont as evidence that the perennial MVP candidate wasn’t fully committed to the Mavs. As MacMahon writes, Harrison also convinced Dumont not to loop Cuban in on those trade talks, contending doing so would likely result in a leak.
• Cuban, who blamed Harrison rather than Dumont for the way in which his role in the organization was minimized, spoke out against the Doncic trade after the fact, and once the Mavs won the draft lottery in May he began pushing more aggressively for Dumont to make a front office change, MacMahon reports. Cuban’s case gained credibility because his criticisms of Harrison’s roster construction proved true — for instance, Cuban warned Dumont that a lack of ball-handling and play-making would result in Dallas having a poor offense, concerns which Harrison dismissed. The Mavs currently have the second-worst offense in the NBA.
• Cuban’s relationship with Dumont never became contentious and he’s now once again part of the small group of team officials that has the governor’s ear, along with Kidd and co-interim GMs Michael Finley and Matt Riccardi. One source who spoke to MacMahon made it clear that Cuban is more of a consultant than a decision-maker, but the former majority Mavs owner is nonetheless thrilled to be back in the inner circle. “He’s walking around on air right now,” another team source told ESPN. “Cuban’s floating in his Skechers.”