No fanbase in sports has ridden an emotional roller coaster in the past nine months the way fans of the Dallas Mavericks have. First, the Mavs shocked everyone by trading away perennial First Team All-NBAer Luka Doncic in February. That move sent the entire fanbase into a collective depression, which was only exacerbated when Kyrie Irving tore his ACL a few weeks later, and the team limped to the finish and missed the playoffs.
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Mavs fans were jolted back to life by a shocking lottery win when the team overcame 1.8% odds to land generational prospect Cooper Flagg. All of a sudden, the future was bright again, but the start of the season has made clear a harsh reality: the Mavericks are just not a good team right now.
Dallas has played a soft schedule, yet is only 3-7 through its first 10 games. In short, nothing has gone right, as Anthony Davis has missed the last five games due to a calf injury, Flagg has struggled after head coach Jason Kidd inexplicably made him the team’s point guard, and most of the other recent additions to the team have underperformed as well.
All roads lead back to Mavs general manager Nico Harrison, who’s been hated since he traded Luka away and then bad-mouthed the Slovenian superstar on his way out the door. On The Hoop Collective podcast, ESPN’s Tim McMahon said, “At this point, I believe it’s a matter of when, not if, Nico Harrison will be fired. There is a very, very strong likelihood that will be midseason.”
McMahon detailed some of Harrison’s failures as GM, including luring Klay Thompson away from the Warriors last summer, a move that looks worse by the day as Klay has been relegated to a bench role. D’Angelo Russell was signed as a stopgap until Kyrie returns, but he’s been dreadful, too.
Add that to the bewildering decision to trade away Luka because of fitness concerns for someone like Anthony Davis, whose reputation as a fragile player precedes him, and things just keep getting worse for Harrison. Getting lucky and landing Flagg in the draft doesn’t change that.
“Every time I think that they’ve hit rock bottom, they find a way to drill deeper,” McMahon said, before Brian Windhorst pointed out that the Mavs had to come from behind in the fourth quarter to beat the Wizards on Saturday. That would have put Washington at 2-8 on the season, with both wins against the Mavs.
Forget being on the hot seat, McMahon quipped, “That would have been drilling all the way down to Hades,” if the Mavs had lost that game. He also pointed out that Mavs president Patrick Dumont said at the time of the Luka trade, “In Nico we trust,” but offered his own opinion that “The trust is disintegrated at this point.”
MacMohan gave an example of the same. “Anthony Davis wanted to play Saturday in Washington… There was internal disagreement about whether that was a good idea… One of the opinions that was involved here was Patrick Dumont. Patrick Dumont went from blind faith in Nico to weighing in on whether a star can come back from injury.”
It certainly hasn’t helped that a slimmed-down Luka is averaging 37 points, 10 rebounds, and 9.5 assists per game, while the Lakers are 7-3 and riding high even though LeBron James has yet to make his season debut.
If Flagg can reach his considerable potential, the future should still be bright in Dallas, but Harrison gets no credit for taking a player that every other GM would have taken. Every move he’s made has turned sour, and at this point, the next good thing Mavs fans have to look forward to is the day he gets his walking papers.
