The invite flashed across my phone at 6:45 p.m. Monday night. I was invited to what the Dallas Mavericks termed a “roundtable” with Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison and team president Rick Welts the following morning at 10 a.m. The subject matter was undisclosed, although the lure was obvious: an audience with Harrison, who had not done any interviews since the morning after he traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in early February.
The invitation came with conditions. An ultra limited guest list. No live tweeting. No live streaming. No cameras or audio recording. A transcript of the discussion would be provided by the team afterward. The team would later amend the policy about audio recording; recorders could be used but no audio clips could be released from the session. It was all bizarre.
I walked into the American Airlines Center bracing myself for a very weird morning. It turned out to be even weirder—and not just because no one touched the breakfast spread of coffee and croissants the Mavs offered us. The air was heavy. Harrison, stiff as a board in a blue checkered suit, made it heavier.
To Harrison’s left was Rick Welts. The CEO seemed loose. He’d spent decades in NBA front offices, which has provided decades of lessons in how to say the right things. So he did his best to say them. Welts discussed his optimism for the future. He mentioned that, while it might not look like it, Patrick Dumont played basketball as a child. (Because his boyhood love for a sport qualifies him to own and steward an NBA franchise?) Welts claimed that about 75 to 80 percent of Mavs season ticket holders have already renewed for next season. He outlined broad concepts for a new arena, which the team intends to have ready after its lease with the AAC expires in 2031. The team is looking to secure 30 to 50 acres of land within the Dallas city limits to build on. He made no mention of the former Texas Stadium site that it already owns in Irving.
Then it was Harrison’s turn.
His eyes wandered around the room, shifting from one person to the next. He thanked us for being there in a fashion that felt like someone reminded him beforehand to thank us for being there. He knew what lay ahead. “Hopefully I can answer your questions up to the best of my ability,” he said. “I’m here to provide you with a blueprint of how we move forward.”
Anyone remotely attuned to how the last two months have played out is well versed in the many, many ways this blueprint has failed. “Fire Nico” chants rain down at home games (and Stars games and sometimes Medieval Times, too). The team, burdened by Kyrie Irving’s season-ending ACL tear, along with shorter-term injuries to many other players, slumped to the bottom of the play-in games; the Mavericks will need to win back-to-back single-elimination road games for a chance to make the playoffs and get whipped by Oklahoma City. Dončić’s return to Dallas last week was the city’s most emotional sports moment since the Rangers won the World Series, the clearest reminder yet that no one is ready to move on.
Still, Harrison is of the belief that that chapter is officially closed. The tribute video, the thank-you shirts, the whole program, Harrison told us in that room, should have provided the fans with “the closure to the trade. It was a good opportunity for the fans to say thank you and wish him good luck.”
Then, about 13 minutes into our conversation, he said it: “Defense wins championships.” The statement came in response to a question about maximizing the return for Dončić, and it would not be the last time we heard it. Harrison would return to that line again and again as we peppered him with all the questions he had declined to answer for the past two months, so much so that I should have started a tally. (Although it’s probably good I didn’t; I might’ve run out of ink.) Later, after what would be Harrison’s final “defense wins championships” mention, DLLS’ Tim Cato and I couldn’t help but look at each other and scoff.
It did not take long to realize that Harrison had reflected on little and learned even less. So you could probably guess what he said around the 15-minute mark, when he was asked if he regretted the trade.
“No,” he said, defiantly.
“Every trade I’ve made since I’ve been here has been met with high scrutiny,” he added. “So eventually I’ll earn the trust of this community that some of these trades work out. The roster that would’ve been on the floor [had it not been for injuries], that’s a championship-caliber team. And although fans could have been upset with trading Luka, they wouldn’t have been upset with the results.”
What if? Yes, Harrison wants Mavs fans to believe in the ifs. Believe that if the injuries would not have happened to Kyrie, to AD, to Daniel Gafford, that this team would be more than a play-in team this season. And that next season they would compete for a championship. That if this team turns into a winning team, all will be forgiven. That if a championship banner is hoisted with this core, the fans will just forget about Luka.
“I do believe that once we win, the fans will come back,” he said. This from a man who later said, “Some of those decisions are going to be unpopular, maybe to Dirk [Nowitzki] and maybe to the fans, but my obligation is to the Dallas Mavericks.”
It didn’t get better from there. Harrison stood firm on his Anthony Davis fixation: “We wanted a two-way player and when we had that opportunity, we struck.” He defended his decision not to shop the deal for a better offer: “We’re talking about a player [in Luka] who, this summer, would have had a decision to make whether he signs the supermax [contract] or he waits.” Dončić’s own words and actions indicated that, yes, he would have signed the five-year, $345 million supermax Dallas could have offered him. When pushed by ESPN’s Tim MacMahon on the subject, Harrison closed that line of inquiry with a testy: “We can agree to disagree.”
Harrison was asked about how trading a 25-year-old generational talent was in the best interest of the team. He parried the question with another rendition of “Defense wins championships.” But weren’t the Mavericks already on the cusp of that championship last season? “Defense wins championships.” Welts tagged back in with an anecdote about his days in charge of the Warriors, when Golden State’s fanbase was furious at management for trading fan favorite (and future Mav) Monta Ellis, until a young point guard named Steph Curry came around. He apparently was oblivious to the notion that Dončić was Curry, not Ellis, in this analogy.
Harrison reached a breaking point sometime around the 48-minute mark when MacMahon started to press about why the organization parted ways with former medical staff members Casey Smith, Jeremy Holsopple, and Casey Spangler. Smith, in particular, is regarded as one of league’s best in his role. “I’m not going to sit here and go back and forth,” Harrison said. “You’re coming at me from a negative standpoint, and I’m looking at it from a positive standpoint. The guys we brought in are better.” It was at that point that I thought MacMahon was going to stand up and leave.
There’s more, but the point lies far less in what was said in that room than how it felt being in there. Like nothing can be questioned, and no one could possibly know better, not the media, not the greatest player in franchise history, not the people whose interest sustains the team as a business enterprise.
Recently, I heard Kansas City Chiefs owner and CEO Clark Hunt tell a story about his father, Lamar, one of the most successful businessmen in the history of sports. “My dad always said, ‘It’s about the fans; specifically, the season-ticket holders.’ A lot of people, when you think about a professional sports team, you think about the coaches, or you think about the players, but for him, he was always laser focused on the fans. Because he rightfully said, ‘You can’t have success on the field unless you have a passionate fan base and somebody who’s paying the bills.’”
Hunt carried that ethos into running the most successful team in the country’s biggest pro sports league. Meanwhile, the Mavericks are tumbling down the standings and bleeding nine-figure money, with Harrison seemingly clueless as to how he set all of that in motion. Without that self-reflection, it’s hard to imagine much changing or everyone being ready to move forward the way Harrison so badly hopes they will.
After 56 minutes and 57 seconds, the meeting adjourned. Harrison was the first man out the door.
