Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison has been public enemy No. 1 ever since he traded away Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in February. The fanbase has been calling for Harrison’s firing, but minority owner Mark Cuban made it clear on SiriusXM NBA Radio that he still has confidence in the executive.
“Trades are trades,” Cuban said. “I let Steve Nash go, and the whole town hated my a** for a long time. Like not a little bit… He wins two MVPs and I got nothing back for him, right?”
Cuban was referring to his decision to let Steve Nash go to the Phoenix Suns in free agency in 2004. He did not want to give the then-30-year-old Nash the kind of long-term deal that the veteran guard wanted, and it proved to be a big mistake.
Nash won back-to-back MVPs in 2005 and 2006, and Cuban was widely criticized for letting him go for nothing. While that was a bad decision, he wasn’t exactly a generational talent.
No one could have foreseen the kind of success Nash was going to have, but that won’t be the case with Doncic. Still, with how difficult the new CBA has made life for general managers, Cuban isn’t being too hard on Harrison.
“Not every decision is one everybody’s going to agree with, but there’s a lot more to being a general manager, and particularly now with the new CBA and the second apron,” Cuban stated. “Trying to put together a team, and being able to keep together a team, is a lot harder.
“You saw what OKC did, which was smart,” Cuban continued. “They signed all those guys now, and people are like, ‘How can you sign all these guys to money?’ Well, they signed it now because the cap is as low as it is going to be for a while and they know it’s going to go up 10 percent a year, so it kinda positions them well.
“Nico’s done the same thing,” Cuban added. “We’ve got guys, everybody but P.J. [Washington] is on an extended contract. So we’re gonna keep on having more and more room because those contracts are locked in.”
The Mavericks recently re-signed Kyrie Irving and Daniel Gafford to three-year extensions, and Cuban believes Harrison is doing a pretty good job overall. The team might have to win a title or two in the coming years for the fanbase to believe that’s the case as well.
While Cuban still has confidence in Harrison, he certainly wasn’t a fan of the decision to trade Doncic. He had made it clear that the Slovenian wouldn’t have been traded if he were still the majority owner.
Cuban had also stated that the Mavericks didn’t get enough in return for Doncic. They got Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and a 2029 first-round pick from the Lakers for the superstar guard.
Cuban felt the conversation would have been different if the Mavericks had gotten four first-round picks. Even that might not have been enough to ease the fanbase’s pain, though.
