The fall of the House of Nico

A quick update on the worst trade I’ve seen * in more than four decades of following professional sports:

• Luka Doncic is averaging 37.1 points, 9.4 rebounds and 9.1 assists/game in 7 starts. He ranks in the top 5 in every major NBA efficiency metric. Admittedly, for some reason “aesthetic resemblance to Kobe Bryant” is not one of those metrics.
• The Lakers are 8-3.
• Anthony Davis has started 5 games for Dallas, scoring 20.8/10.2/2.2.
• The Mavericks, despite winning the draft lottery and the #1 pick having played every game, are 3-8.
• Every Mavericks home game is dominated by “Fire Nico” chants.
• Have I mentioned that Davis is six years older than Doncic with a much more extensive injury history, so there’s no longer-term upside to the trade either? And the Lakers are a conference rival?

You can probably seen where this was headed:

Nine months ago, Nico Harrison made the worst decision of his life. The general manager of the Dallas Mavericks shocked the basketball world by doing something exactly none of his peers would ever have dreamed of.

He willingly traded away Luka Doncic, a perennial All-Star and one of the best players in the world, to the rival Los Angeles Lakers. A move that looked like a disaster at the time has somehow become worse with each passing month. Doncic looks like an MVP in purple and gold, while the Mavericks flounder in the cellar of the Western Conference. Every chance they get, Dallas fans have chanted “Fire Nico!” 

Now those fans have gotten their wish. 

Dallas owner Patrick Dumont attended the team’s game on Monday in person, sitting courtside as he watched the Mavericks drop yet another game at home. Tuesday morning, the Mavericks fired Harrison, bringing the saga of the most ill-advised trade in NBA history to a close.

“No one associated with the Mavericks organization is happy with the start of what we all believed would be a promising season,” Dumont wrote in a letter announcing Harrison’s firing. “When the results don’t meet expectations, it’s my responsibility to act.”

In the annals of questionable deals in sports, the Doncic trade slots in right next to the Red Sox sending Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees more than a century prior. Doncic, a Slovenian phenom who trained as a teenager at Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid, had spent his first six seasons in Dallas proving himself to be exactly the sort of player any franchise would die for.

Doncic made five straight All-NBA first teams. He notched a 60-point triple-double and a 73-point career high. He single-handedly carried the Mavericks to the NBA Finals in 2024.

None of that was enough for Harrison.

Before he took charge of the Mavericks, Harrison had been a longtime executive at Nike, where he developed a friendship with Kobe Bryant. Bryant, in turn, became Harrison’s template for what a true superstar looked like: a cutthroat competitor, a maniacal worker, someone who gave every ounce of effort every second.

Doncic, whose weight has fluctuated and who has sometimes missed games with nagging injuries, didn’t quite fit the template. “We really feel that defense wins championships,” Harrison said after trading Doncic away, “and we think the players that we’re bringing in add to the culture.”

There was just one problem with Harrison’s plan: nearly every day since the Doncic trade, the Mavericks’ culture has gotten worse and worse.

And this production of Our American Cousin was terrible!

What I still can’t get over about the deal is that’s it’s an extreme form of the kind of irrational trade unsuccessful teams make when they start blaming their best players for the failures of their management, except that the team had won its conference the previous season! Nico just impulsively decided to trade his star because he didn’t remind him enough of his boyhood idol, and selected his trade target because he was another binkie that he had worked with at Nike.

Of course, the right time to fire him was one second after he proposed the trade to ownership (who are obviously also guilty of murdering the franchise for actually agreeing to this shit rather than having Nico immediately thrown out of his office window by team security.) But marginally better nine months too late than another day more.

*bmaz points out in comments that the DeShaun Watson trade is a strong contender. And, yeah, effectively trading Jahmyr Gibbs, Brian Thomas, and some other pieces for the right to pay $230M guaranteed to a serial sexual harasser to provide sub-replacement-level quarterbacking is about as bad as it gets.