Many Dallas Mavericks fans woke up Sunday morning to the shocking news that Luka Dončić had been traded to the Los Angeles Lakers as part of a three-team deal that brought Anthony Davis to Dallas.
As soon as news of the mind-blowing trade dropped late Saturday night, NBA folks have been craving answers from Mavs GM Nico Harrison about how the deal happened and, perhaps most importantly, why it seemed so important to trade the team’s star player in the prime of his career in what many think is a severely undervalued deal?
Harrison appeared, briefly, alongside head coach Jason Kidd on Sunday to discuss the trade.
The fourth-year general manager opened the presser by trying to crack a joke about media attendance but it seemed to fall flat. He immediately pivoted to discussing the reasoning behind the trade.
“The players that we’re bringing in, we believe, exemplify that [culture],” he told reporters. “Defense wins championships, and we’re bringing in one of the best two-way players in the league. A lot of people don’t talk about what [Anthony Davis] does defensively and offensively, but if you guys can name a First-Team All-NBA players that are also First-Team Defensive players, that’s a unique unicorn to try to find, and we were able to find that.”
After being asked to explain why the 2024 NBA scoring champion didn’t fit into that “culture,” Harrison danced around an answer.
“One thing about me, I’m not going to talk bad about any players, like that’s not going to do us or me any good. I’ll just say there’s levels to it,” he said. “There’s people that fit the culture and there’s people that come in and add to the culture. And those are two distinct things. And I believe the people that are coming in are adding to the culture.”
He then added that the deal was an attempt to get ahead of potentially losing their star player to free agency without getting anything in return. Dončić was eligible for a supermax extension in the upcoming offseason had he remained with Dallas.
“There’s some unique things about [Dončić’s] contract that we had to pay attention to,” Harrison said. “There’s other teams that were loading up that he was going to be able to decide and make his own decision at some point about whether he wants to be here or not. Whether we want to supermax him or not. Whether he wants to opt-out. So, I think we had to take all of that into consideration, and I feel like we got out in front of what could’ve been a tumultuous summer.”
“No, not at all. Nothing verbally that would believe me to believe that [he would opt out],” he said.
Harrison also confirmed that instead of shopping Dončić on the open market, he only spoke with Lakers GM Rob Pelinka about a potential deal.
“I’d like to give Rob Pelinka a lot of credit,” he said. “Trades don’t happen at the smallest level without stuff getting out, and Rob and I were able to have really intense conversations over the course of three or four weeks that started out as a coffee that was more, ‘Hey, would you ever?’… It built upon that, and we kept it between us… J-Kidd didn’t know about it, but J-Kidd and I are aligned… I felt good about it making sense to where we’re trying to go.”
Harrison then ended his appearance the same way he started it, with an awkward joke that didn’t quite land.
“The future to me is 3-4 years from now,” said Harrison. “The future 10 years from now, they’ll probably bury me and J-[Kidd] by then. Or we’ll bury ourselves (awkward laughter).”
With that, he walked out after around eight minutes, leaving Kidd to handle the rest of the questions.
If the goal here was to assuage Mavericks fans and provide a clear explanation for why the team just traded away one of the best players in the league for an older, injury-prone star, it didn’t feel like Harrison accomplished the goal. If anything, the unserious nature of his appearance seemed to drive home the sense that Dallas is flying by the seat of its pants here.