Nico Harrison, the former general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, made many head-scratching comments after he inexplicably traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, last February. He claimed that exchanging the twenty-five-year-old Dončić, one of the best basketball players in the world, for the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Davis, a decorated yet injury-prone big man nearing the end of his prime, would help the Mavericks “win now and win in the future.” The season prior, Dončić had led the Mavericks to the N.B.A. Finals in one of the more dominant individual playoff runs in recent memory. Was the franchise with Dončić not already in position to win now and in the future? In Davis’s first game with Dallas, he suffered an adductor strain that sidelined him for several weeks; a month later, the team’s All-Star point guard, Kyrie Irving, tore his A.C.L. “Next year, when our team comes back, we’re going to be competing for a championship,” Harrison said after the Mavericks finished out the rest of the season with thirteen wins and twenty losses, missing the playoffs. A month later, Harrison received a lifeline: in a historic stroke of luck, Dallas won the N.B.A. draft lottery despite having just a 1.8-per-cent chance of doing so. (Only three other teams in league history had won with worse odds.) “Fortune favors the bold,” Harrison said, repressing a smile, after the team selected phenom Cooper Flagg with the first pick in the draft. He added later, “I think the fans can finally start to see the vision.”
This past Tuesday, after a 3–8 start to the season, the Mavericks fired Harrison. Davis, naturally, is hurt again, and the timeline for Irving’s return remains unclear. Dončić, meanwhile, has electrified Los Angeles, posting gaudy box scores and producing awe-inducing highlights in a bid to win his first league M.V.P. award. Mavericks fans, forced to watch their beloved Slovenian point forward foster another city’s championship dreams, have revolted. The rallying cry “Fire Nico” has become a staple at Mavericks home games, a stadium-wide salvo loud enough to pierce through any televised broadcast. (Last year, during Dončić’s first game against the Mavericks in Los Angeles, the crowd cheered “Thank you, Nico!”) The home crowd’s displeasure was on display the night before Harrison’s termination, in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks. With 1.2 seconds left, and the Mavericks down by three points, the Dallas forward P. J. Washington was at the free-throw line with a chance to send the game to overtime. But the fans seemed not to care, and, despite the high-stakes moment—Washington had three free throws—the familiar refrain of “Fire Nico” echoed through the stadium. The Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo smirked while preparing to box out, and Washington made one but missed his final two free throws. After the loss, the Mavericks’ head coach, Jason Kidd, said that his players felt “disrespected” and that it was “hard to keep guys here when they start to think the home team is not home.” Harrison, meanwhile, was still waiting for fortune to favor his boldness. “Time will tell if I’m right,” he had conceded the day after the Dončić trade. Now, nearly ten months later, time seems to have run out.
The trade, of course, never made any sense. Perhaps the only analogous transaction in professional-sports history, as Louisa Thomas identified in her post-mortem of the trade for The New Yorker, is when the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for cash. Harrison’s rationale for trading Dončić appeared to be twofold. “Defense wins championships,” he argued, referring to Davis’s élite rim protection and on-ball switchability, and no doubt spurning Dončić’s subpar, occasionally dreadful, defensive performances. (Last year, in the Finals, as the Mavericks fell three games to none to the Boston Celtics, the ESPN reporter Brian Windhorst had described Dončić as being “a hole on the court” defensively and claimed that the team had “pleaded with him” to be better.) The other related, though less explicitly explained, reason for the transaction was that Dončić was often accused of not taking his conditioning seriously—he had repeatedly arrived at training camp overweight—arguably resulting in a higher probability of injury. (Dončić was rehabbing a left-calf strain when the trade occurred, though he has mostly been healthy throughout his career.)
