Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison made an interesting admission Monday when talking to reporters about his decision to trade fan favorite Luka Doncic to the Lakers in February.
No, Harrison did not admit that the move was a mistake. On the contrary, he clung tightly to his “defense wins championships” explanation for making the deal that sent Doncic to Los Angeles and brought elite defender Anthony Davis to Dallas.
But after more than two months of Mavericks fans calling for his firing — in a very loud and visible fashion — Harrison did admit that he had underestimated the level of outrage the surprise trade would cause.
“I did know that Luka was important to the fan base,” said Harrison, a former longtime Nike executive whose fourth season with the Mavericks ended Friday with a play-in loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. “I didn’t quite know it to what level.”
Doncic, 26, endeared himself to the Dallas fan base during his six-plus seasons with the organization, making the All-Star Game five times and leading the Mavericks to the 2024 NBA Finals. If Harrison didn’t realize the level of fans’ adoration for the Slovenian superstar before the trade, he certainly does now.
“When you have 20,000 people in the stadium chanting ‘Fire Nico,’ you really feel it,” Harrison said. “I mean it’s — I use the word ‘awesome,’ but not in a positive way. Like, you can really feel how they feel.
“But my job is to make decisions I feel are in the best interest of this organization, and I gotta stand by the decisions, and some of them are going to be unpopular. This was clearly one that’s unpopular.”
Harrison said he thought — and still thinks — fans would have taken more kindly to trading away such a beloved player if they had been able to see his and the organization’s “vision” of a starting five of Davis, Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson, P.J. Washington and Dereck Lively II.
Instead, an onslaught of injuries prevented those five from taking the floor together at all.
“Really the way we looked at it was, if you’re putting a team on the floor that’s Kyrie, Klay, P.J., Anthony Davis and Lively, we feel that’s a championship-caliber team and we would’ve been winning at a high level and that would have quieted some of the outrage. And so unfortunately we weren’t able to do that, so [the outrage] just continued to go on and on.”
Harrison added that he expects the core team to be back next season and will “be competing for a championship.”
“I believe winning will help repair the relationship with the fans and that’s what we plan to do,” he said.
Harrison was speaking at a news conference that took place six days after he and team CEO Rick Welts held a closed-door roundtable discussion with a small, select group of media members. Those reporters were not allowed to bring cameras and initially were told they could not bring audio recording devices either, although they ended up being allowed to record the meeting for transcription purposes only.
The purpose of the roundtable was to provide closure to the Doncic situation, but Harrison acknowledged Monday that didn’t happen.
“The goal was that I answered all the [Doncic] questions, [so] today I could talk about the team as it currently is and then what we do going forward,” Harrison said. “But because it fell flat, today I’m basically answering the same questions I answered last week because we didn’t do a good enough job.”
During the roundtable event, Harrison repeatedly fell back on the “defense wins championships” mantra as an explanation for trading Doncic. During an interview with ESPN’s Malika Andrews that aired Friday, Doncic was asked about Harrison’s comments.
“It’s just sad the way he’s talking right now,” Doncic said. “I never say anything bad about him, and I just want to move on. The fans, my ex-teammates, I’ll always keep at heart. It’s time for me to move on from there.”
Told of Doncic’s comment, Harrison said: “I feel the same way he does. I’ve actually never spoken ill of Luka at all, and I’m just ready to move on with this team that we have.”
For Harrison and the Mavericks, the opportunity to move on won’t come until next season. Doncic, on the other hand, has the chance to take another step in the process as the Lakers host the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night with the chance to tie their first-round playoff series at one win apiece.
L.A. fans seem to know how important Doncic is to possibly making that happen.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
