Mavs GM Nico Harrison Said Owner Patrick Dumont ‘Laughed At Me’ The First Time He Brought Up Trading Luka Doncic

The prevailing question on the minds of everyone around the NBA on Sunday was: Why would the Mavs do this? After trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, everyone from fans to media to other players to executives around the league were trying to figure out why the Mavs would trade a 25-year-old, 5-time All-NBA player the year after making it to the NBA Finals.

The first thought that popped into everyone’s mind was this being a stealth trade request, but that was shut down both privately by sourced reports and also publicly by Mavs GM Nico Harrison when he and Jason Kidd met with the media in Cleveland before the Mavs faced the Cavs. This was a trade that was initiated by Dallas, and on Saturday night Tim MacMahon of ESPN reported the Mavs had concerns about Doncic’s conditioning and giving him a supermax extenstion this summer that would kick in in 2027.

As for how this got clearance from the top down, Harrison was asked on Sunday what new owner Patrick Dumont’s reaction was when he told him he was thinking about trading the franchise’s top star, and said Dumont initially laughed at him (video here).

“The first time he laughed at me,” Harrison said with a laugh (that was not shared by Kidd sitting next to him). “No, I mean, Patrick he’s the owner, obviously he’s the ultimate decision-maker, but he entrusts J-Kidd and I to lead this team and he’s putting the trust into us. And then obviously you gotta get judged on the performance that you’ve done as a leader, and at some point if it doesn’t work out then I’ll be judged for that.”

I gotta say, I think Dumont’s initial instinct to laugh off the idea of trading Luka was the right one and they might should’ve stuck with that. It’s really hard to see how the Mavs successfully navigate the long-term after this trade. There’s certainly a world where Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis make them competitive in the West, although they will not be considered among the top contenders. The issue comes in a few years as Irving turns 33 and Davis turns 32 later this season, while Doncic is just entering his prime, turning 26 soon. Trading away that kind of talent at this stage in his career without being asked to do it by the star is unheard of, and, quite frankly, laughable.

The rest of Harrison’s press conference on Sunday didn’t go much better, as the spin the Mavs are putting on all of this makes little to no sense. They’re trading away Doncic due to a lack of reliability but are bringing in a player with an even worse history of missing time with injuries in Davis. If it’s a financial move to get out of the tax, which certainly played a role given how they brought in the Jazz to take on Jalen Hood-Schifino and move below that threshold, it’s unfathomable from a new ownership group that has a team coming off a Finals appearance. Harrison went on to say this wasn’t a move made with 10 years down the road under consideration but 3-4 years, joking he and Kidd (who did not seem thrilled to be sitting there) would likely be gone long before then, which makes even less sense to go after Doncic’s conditioning when the guy has averaged north of 28/8/8 for the first seven years of his career, made the conference finals twice, and the Finals once even with those concerns.

The pressure is now firmly on this Mavs group to win at a high level in the immediate future to salvage anything out of this trade, but if this does not result in at least a few deep playoff runs soon, Harrison will be gone and this quote will haunt him and the Mavs for a long time.