Well, it took a nine-month span in which he traded away one of the best and most popular players in the world and presided over an NBA Finals team plunging into the Western Conference’s cellar, but multiple reports suggest that Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison’s seat might finally be getting a little toasty.
After a weekend that saw the Mavericks get drilled by the previously free-falling Memphis Grizzlies and eke out a win over the 1-9 Washington Wizards, the Mavericks are off to a 3-7 start to the 2025-26 NBA season. The Wizards’ lone win this season? It came against the Mavs.
That 3-7 record is the second-worst mark in the West, ahead of only the disastrous New Orleans Pelicans … who, um, beat the Mavs last week. They rank 29th in the NBA in offensive efficiency, ahead of only the woeful Indiana Pacers … who, um, came within a misfired wide-open Aaron Nesmith 3-pointer of beating the Mavs a week and a half ago.
Advertisement
Like those Pacers, these Mavericks are playing without their All-NBA point guard. Without either of them, in fact. One, Kyrie Irving, remains in street clothes, recovering from a torn left ACL.
The other? Well, as you might remember, Harrison traded him to Los Angeles.
That combination of Dallas’ punchlessness, with No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg struggling to shoulder a star-level shot-creation burden, and Luka Dončić’s scorching start, leading the Lakers to a 7-3 record as the primary initiator of a top-10 offense — all while Dončić trade return/expected cornerstone Anthony Davis yet again misses time — has both the chants and the chatter surrounding Harrison’s job security getting louder and louder. As veteran NBA insider Marc Stein put it, “If Harrison’s position as the team’s lead decision-maker is not yet untenable, well, you can certainly see that status from here.”
Advertisement
From Stein:
League sources tell The Stein Line that the rising and virtually ceaseless negativity that surrounds the franchise is indeed wearing on and troubling ownership.
While [Mavericks owner Patrick] Dumont seemingly prefers to give Harrison more time, contemplating whether an in-season change is the wisest course for the Mavericks to try to forge ahead post-Dončić has become unavoidable at the highest levels of the organization […]
If Dumont eventually concludes that a mid-stream change is the best course — while it is by no means clear at this juncture where the Mavericks would turn in terms of a long-term successor — it’s believed that step would be taken not only for its vibe shift potential and as a means to try to win back alienated fans … but also based on the premise that the front office executive who conceived and pushed for the widely criticized Dončić deal can no longer be the one trying to pilot the organization past it.
Stein’s not the only plugged-in reporter in Dallas sounding the alarm. On Monday’s episode of the Brian Windhorst and the Hoop Collective podcast, ESPN’s Tim MacMahon said, “At this point, I believe it is a matter of when, not if, Nico Harrison will be fired. And there is a very, very strong likelihood that [it] will be midseason.”
Jun 27, 2025; Dallas, TX, USA; Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison speaks to the media at the Dallas Mavericks Practice Facility. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / Reuters)
Such an ouster would mark a downright astonishing speed run for Harrison — from the verge of the NBA’s promised land, as the architect of a conference champion, to potentially out of the league in a year and a half.
It’s not just the long tail of the Luka trade with which Harrison has to contend, either.
Advertisement
The decision to import Klay Thompson on a three-year, $50 million deal following the 2024 NBA Finals has not panned out. The 35-year-old is shooting 31.6% from the field and 26.4% from 3-point range on the season, prompting head coach Jason Kidd to move the former All-Star to the bench in favor of D’Angelo Russell.
Kidd felt compelled to make the move not only because of Thompson’s individual struggles, but because of how brutally inoperable the Mavericks’ offense was proving to be with Irving on the shelf and with Flagg, an 18-year-old playing point guard for the first time in his life, floundering on the ball in the absence of an established professional point guard. Russell, the stopgap answer that Harrison signed in free agency, is shooting just 37.5% from the field and 27.5% from 3-point land himself. He has scored 24 points in 54 minutes across three games since being moved into the starting five; the Mavericks have been outscored by 57 points in those 54 minutes.
With Dallas looking for players capable of both providing consistent 3-point shooting and potentially taking on a larger share of the ball-handling responsibilities, you know who it might be nice to have around? Quentin Grimes, who showed signs of having more to his offensive game late last season and has gotten off to a great start to this one — 17.2 points, 4.1 rebounds and 4.4 assists in 31 minutes per game, shooting 56% on 2-pointers and 40% on 3-pointers while taking more than six per game.
Advertisement
Alas: Grimes is doing that in Philadelphia, because that’s where Harrison sent him at the 2025 trade deadline, in exchange for Caleb Martin — who dealt with hip injuries down the stretch of last season and has played all of 72 minutes for the Mavericks thus far this season, with more personal fouls (13) than points scored (12).
Harrison made that move in part to rebalance Dallas’ roster. Thanks to bringing in Max Christie as part of the Luka/AD trade, Dallas suddenly had multiple 3-and-D two-guards, and Christie was under guaranteed contract for two more seasons while Grimes was about to hit restricted free agency. (Grimes wound up signing his one-year, $8.7 million qualifying offer to stay with Philly.) Christie has played well in Dallas — 13.1 points in 29.9 minutes per game on 50/46/81 shooting splits this season — but doesn’t profile as the kind of playmaker capable of stepping into a more significant on-ball role for a team in desperate need of more creators.
Not the same kind of playmaker as, say, Austin Reaves — his former Lakers teammate, whom Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka kept out of the Luka/AD trade talks, and whose absence from them some pundits categorized as malpractice on Harrison’s part. Reaves finished last season as one of 10 players in the NBA to average at least 20 points and five assists per game on .600 true shooting; earlier this season, when Dončić was sidelined by knee and finger ailments, Reaves averaged 40 points and 10 assists over a three-game stretch.
[Get more Mavs news: Dallas team feed]
On one hand, Harrison is bearing the brunt of a brutal run of injuries in Dallas; there aren’t many teams that would be in particularly great shape when playing without their first-choice point guard, power forward and center. (Dereck Lively II has missed seven games with a knee injury, while Daniel Gafford missed five with an ankle sprain.) On the other, this was always the downside risk of the roster that Harrison constructed.
Advertisement
Building around Davis and Irving, both of whom have missed significant time to injuries in multiple seasons, put the Mavs in a precarious position should one or both pick up a knock. Devoting nearly 70% of the salary cap to Davis, Irving and Thompson left the Mavs with precious little flexibility to add complementary talent capable of scaling up in time of need. And by responding to the Finals loss to the Celtics by leaning so heavily in the direction of size and defense, Harrison left the team light on shooting and playmaking.
Despite entering Monday’s matchup with the Milwaukee Bucks ranked fifth in defensive efficiency, the Mavs have been one of the worst teams in the NBA. Defense might win championships, but only if you’ve got an offensive engine powerful enough to get that defense deep into the playoffs and give it a chance. Without Luka or Kyrie, Harrison doesn’t have that … and, from the sound of it, that’s not the only thing he doesn’t have anymore.
“After that Luka trade, Patrick Dumont, one of his infamous quotes was, ‘In Nico we trust,’” MacMahon said. “I’m just telling you: The trust has disintegrated at this point.”
That lack of trust reared its head, according to MacMahon, in the decision over whether or not to clear Davis to return from his left calf strain over the weekend.
Advertisement
Davis, MacMahon said, had been ramping up in anticipation of playing Saturday in Washington. After some “internal disagreement” over whether it would be a good idea to get Davis — who has played in only 14 of Dallas’ 43 regular-season games since the trade — back on the floor so quickly, with Dumont reportedly getting involved in the discussion, the All-Star big man wound up missing the win over the Wizards. He’s listed as questionable against the Bucks on Monday.
“Patrick Dumont went from blind faith in Nico to now weighing in on whether a star can come back from injury,” MacMahon said.
That invites a follow-up question: If Dumont has reached the point of not trusting the way Harrison’s front office navigates something like a player’s return-to-play protocol — to say nothing of the evaluations, negotiations and decision-making that have led Dallas to sink like a stone in the standings — then why would he trust Harrison to steer the Mavericks through February’s trade deadline? Or, for that matter, through the 2026 NBA Draft — which, thanks to the Harrison-helmed moves that brought in Grant Williams, Irving, P.J. Washington and Gafford, will be the last time the Mavs have full control of their first-round pick until 2031?
Advertisement
After Harrison made perhaps the most consequential trade in Mavericks franchise history, he explained it by saying that replacing the 25-year-old Dončic with the 31-year-old Davis “fits our timeframe.”
“If you pair [Davis] with Kyrie and the rest of the guys, he fits right along with our timeframe to win now and win in the future,” Harrison said. “And the future to me is three, four years from now. The future 10 years from now, I don’t know. They’ll probably bury me and [Kidd] by then. Or we’ll bury ourselves.”
Forget about 10 years: If things don’t change drastically, and soon, we might be throwing dirt on his Mavericks tenure inside of 10 months. The lesson: Life can come at you awfully fast in the NBA … especially when you trade away a prime-aged superstar.
