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Welcome back to Open Floor, the newsletter that spends so much time in Oklahoma City that it might have to start paying local taxes. The Thunder took care of the Warriors in the first end of an intriguing back-to-back—more on Golden State here—and will take on Luka Dončić and the Lakers on Wednesday. Oklahoma City looks scary good to start the season. The Thunder are 11–1 after steamrolling the Warriors with a point differential (+14.4) more than a point better than last season’s ridiculous number. And that’s without Jalen Williams playing a single minute.
The big story this week, of course, is in Dallas, where the Mavericks fired embattled general manager Nico Harrison, canning Harrison nine months—nine freaking months—after he traded franchise cornerstone Dončić. I covered all the reasons the Mavs had to fire Harrison, which boil down to even if you believe Harrison’s vision for the team could work—and it had become less and less believable by the month—Harrison had become toxic to a Dallas fan base that will never forgive him for shipping Dončić away.
As for what’s next, I’m told that Mark Cuban, the Mavs’ minority owner who was exiled from basketball operations by Harrison, is back at the table. I’m also told that radical roster changes have already been discussed by Dallas’s new brain trust. Big changes could be coming to Big D.
Open Floor podcast: What led to Nico Harrison’s firing
Rachel Nichols is back and we unpacked all the reasons Dallas had to move on from Harrison, why the Clippers have struggled out of the gate (hint: they are old) and what’s behind Detroit’s rise in the Eastern Conference. Listen here, here and here.
We covered a lot of ground on the Mavericks. Here’s an excerpt from that conversation.
Chris Mannix: So how did we get here?
Rachel Nichols: Nico’s worst day and worst decision stemmed from what was in his interest not being in the best interests of the Mavericks and every day since then has stemmed from what is in Nico’s best interest as opposed to the Mavericks’ best interest. Trading Luka Dončić was very clearly to anyone, to someone who had been watching the game for six months, would know that it is not in the Dallas Mavericks’ best interest to trade a generational talent at 25 years old who had just led his team to the NBA Finals. But Nico was fed up. Nico thought, “Ugh, I got to get this guy out of my facility.” He doesn't listen.
CM: Which is wild when you think about that Finals run.
RN: What bothered Nico, what made him call up the Lakers and say, “Have I got a deal for you, friend,” was because in Nico’s day-to-day frustration, best interest was to get rid of that guy. But that was in no way in the best interest of the Dallas Mavericks. And every day since has been, What is in Nico’s best interest? Because the minute Kyrie Irving got hurt, you and I had a discussion, I said to you, is this when you trade [Anthony Davis]?
And you said, first of all you’re crazy. And second of all you said, well Nico Harrison’s never going to do it. And you were right because of course Nico Harrison was not going to go turn around and acknowledge failure about this thing that he had been so heavily criticized for. So that was another moment, a decision, a fork in the road, where Nico operated in Nico’s interests as opposed to the Mavericks’ interests.
The reason why I asked you that the day after Kyrie got hurt was, O.K., Kyrie’s going to be out for nine months to a year, whatever we call it, and he’s injury prone and has a history. AD, we know is injury prone and had a history and sure enough got injured pretty quickly after that and then came back too soon. Why did he come back too soon? He came back too soon to try to justify a trade that Nico had made.
CM: Let me just say two things that I’ve heard from people in Dallas about this Nico situation. One, among the reasons they believe that Patrick Dumont and ownership has to make a change is that they have lost the community. They’ve lost the fan base. And that matters generally speaking, but this is a team that’s working on an arena deal here. They’re trying to get something done for a new building and you have to have goodwill with the community and with the fan base to get something like that done if you want local funding.
One thing somebody suggested to me could be possible is if Nico Harrison gets let go, we could see Jason Kidd take a front office role.
RN: That is fascinating to me.
CM: You know this from Jason’s earlier time as a coach, Jason has always wanted to be a guy that shops for the groceries, to borrow the Bill Parcells line. He has matured, to his credit, in recent years. I thought being humbled in Brooklyn and Milwaukee and then taking an assistant coaching job with the Lakers changed him some. But I think he would want it.
If you let go of Nico Harrison, you can’t hire someone internally. It’s fruit of the poisonous tree. Everyone is tainted in that front office by that trade. Whether or not they fought against it or not, it doesn’t really matter. You’re all part of the same front office. Jason Kidd, his hands are clean in that he’s the coach. He did what he was told, he coaches the team. So I could see a scenario where Jason Kidd is running basketball operations.
Jason Kidd’s got a good eye for talent. He has shown it over the years. And one thing Kidd could do is he could start to repair all those relationships, start to repair the relationship with the community. I mean, he’s got history not just as a coach, of course, he was a player in Dallas, won a championship. Hey, maybe Jason Kidd can be the guy that brings Dirk Nowitzki back into the fold.
RN: I love this idea. I mean the whole community aspect you just built out. I’m not going to repeat it, but it is exactly right. You are exactly right. And it is what the franchise needs and Jason doesn’t just have a good eye for talent. He’s a good recruiter. He was instrumental in Kyrie coming to Dallas. He understands how to talk to guys. You always hear guys in the locker room over there saying, “Well he was a Hall of Fame point guard so I’m going to listen to him.” That sort of thing. That doesn’t change just because he’s not on the bench anymore.
I absolutely believe in him and I think that he definitely has what it takes to at least try and even if he’s not the greatest front office man in the history of the world, he’s not Red Auerbach, it doesn’t matter. What matters is they need to turn a corner and he can offer them something that even the ghost of Red Auerbach could not, which is all that community stuff that you just talked about and the goodwill and just getting the franchise to feel like, “O.K., we are going in a direction where this goes somewhere good.”
I do still think they need to trade Anthony Davis. I mean you lucked out to the luckiest of lucks getting Cooper Flagg. You just need to build around his timeline. Jason Kidd, the coach, doesn’t want all those losses. And by the way, the Mavericks have their pick this year, this year in what is considered the deepest draft that we’ve seen in a couple decades. They have their own pick. They do not have their own pick next year. So this is the time.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Mannix Sources: Mavericks Add Mark Cuban Back Into Mix, Discuss Radical Roster Changes.
