Nico Harrison, the former general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, made many head-scratching comments after he inexplicably traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, last February. He claimed that exchanging the twenty-five-year-old Dončić, one of the best basketball players in the world, for the thirty-one-year-old Anthony Davis, a decorated yet injury-prone big man nearing the end of his prime, would help the Mavericks “win now and win in the future.” The season prior, Dončić had led the Mavericks to the N.B.A. Finals in one of the more dominant individual playoff runs in recent memory. Was the franchise with Dončić not already in position to win now and in the future? In Davis’s first game with Dallas, he suffered an adductor strain that sidelined him for several weeks; a month later, the team’s All-Star point guard, Kyrie Irving, tore his A.C.L. “Next year, when our team comes back, we’re going to be competing for a championship,” Harrison said after the Mavericks finished out the rest of the season with thirteen wins and twenty losses, missing the playoffs. A month later, Harrison received a lifeline: in a historic stroke of luck, Dallas won the N.B.A. draft lottery despite having just a 1.8-per-cent chance of doing so. (Only three other teams in league history had won with worse odds.) “Fortune favors the bold,” Harrison said, repressing a smile, after the team selected phenom Cooper Flagg with the first pick in the draft. He added later, “I think the fans can finally start to see the vision.”

This past Tuesday, after a 3–8 start to the season, the Mavericks fired Harrison. Davis, naturally, is hurt again, and the timeline for Irving’s return remains unclear. Dončić, meanwhile, has electrified Los Angeles, posting gaudy box scores and producing awe-inducing highlights in a bid to win his first league M.V.P. award. Mavericks fans, forced to watch their beloved Slovenian point forward foster another city’s championship dreams, have revolted. The rallying cry “Fire Nico” has become a staple at Mavericks home games, a stadium-wide salvo loud enough to pierce through any televised broadcast. (Last year, during Dončić’s first game against the Mavericks in Los Angeles, the crowd cheered “Thank you, Nico!”) The home crowd’s displeasure was on display the night before Harrison’s termination, in a game against the Milwaukee Bucks. With 1.2 seconds left, and the Mavericks down by three points, the Dallas forward P. J. Washington was at the free-throw line with a chance to send the game to overtime. But the fans seemed not to care, and, despite the high-stakes moment—Washington had three free throws—the familiar refrain of “Fire Nico” echoed through the stadium. The Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo smirked while preparing to box out, and Washington made one but missed his final two free throws. After the loss, the Mavericks’ head coach, Jason Kidd, said that his players felt “disrespected” and that it was “hard to keep guys here when they start to think the home team is not home.” Harrison, meanwhile, was still waiting for fortune to favor his boldness. “Time will tell if I’m right,” he had conceded the day after the Dončić trade. Now, nearly ten months later, time seems to have run out.

The trade, of course, never made any sense. Perhaps the only analogous transaction in professional-sports history, as Louisa Thomas identified in her post-mortem of the trade for The New Yorker, is when the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for cash. Harrison’s rationale for trading Dončić appeared to be twofold. “Defense wins championships,” he argued, referring to Davis’s élite rim protection and on-ball switchability, and no doubt spurning Dončić’s subpar, occasionally dreadful, defensive performances. (Last year, in the Finals, as the Mavericks fell three games to none to the Boston Celtics, the ESPN reporter Brian Windhorst had described Dončić as being “a hole on the court” defensively and claimed that the team had “pleaded with him” to be better.) The other related, though less explicitly explained, reason for the transaction was that Dončić was often accused of not taking his conditioning seriously—he had repeatedly arrived at training camp overweight—arguably resulting in a higher probability of injury. (Dončić was rehabbing a left-calf strain when the trade occurred, though he has mostly been healthy throughout his career.)

What’s confounding about Harrison’s justifications is that the Mavericks had already architected an above-average defense to surround the brilliance of Dončić’s heliocentric offense—it boasted two shot-blocking centers and a plethora of rangy perimeter stoppers. The offense, then, was the differentiating factor for the Dončić-led Mavericks. In the 2024 playoffs, Dallas defeated two of the fiercest defensive teams in the league, the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Oklahoma City Thunder, before finally falling to the Celtics, a group of relentless switching wings who stifled opposing teams’ transition opportunities and perimeter attacks. Dallas reached the Finals, and the Western Conference Finals two years earlier, owing to Dončić’s ceaseless heroics: game-winning step-back threes and ostentatious cross-court passes, his uncanny ability to marionette a defense and create advantageous spacing for his teammates to score. Conversely, the perception that Dončić was a beer-loving, hookah-smoking Luddite—habits that would make his impending five-year, three-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar supermax extension at Dallas an albatross when he inevitably got hurt or too fat—failed to resonate, largely because he was swapped for Davis, a player who had missed nearly thirty-five per cent of his games in the past five seasons.

Photograph by Joe Murphy / Getty

Conspiracy theories began to emerge. Was Dončić enmeshed in legal trouble? Did he have a collapsed lung from all the hookah, or a knee injury that Dallas had kept secret? Were the Mavericks, who had recently been purchased by Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate and major G.O.P. donor, planning to ditch Dallas and move to Las Vegas? As alluring as these possibilities were, the truth was more banal. Harrison, working, it seemed, mostly in isolation, had brokered a deal with Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ president of basketball operations and general manager, without canvassing the league to assess Dončić’s trade value. Here became another point of contention for skeptics of the deal. If Harrison was indeed set on moving off of his franchise star, for whatever reason, why not shop around to garner the most favorable trade package? Would the San Antonio Spurs have traded him their coveted trove of assets, including Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle, playmaking wing Devin Vassell, and every first-round pick they possessed? Would the Houston Rockets have dispensed with future superstars Amen Thompson and Alperen Şengün? Instead, Harrison prioritized privacy: he and Pelinka “kept it between us,” he said. “We had to.” Pelinka said that he thought Harrison was joking when he initially proposed the trade; Patrick Dumont, Adelson’s son-in-law and a Tom Wambsgans-style character who is the team governor, “laughed” at Harrison when the possibility of the trade was first mentioned. Perhaps Harrison should’ve taken these responses as a clue to the impending public reaction: bafflement, humiliation, shock at the audacity (nay, stupidity) of even considering such an absurd idea.

Normally, when an N.B.A. superstar is traded—a common occurrence in the league’s player-empowerment era—a confluence of conditions foretells the eventual decision. Often the player demands a trade, whether owing to clashes with the coaching staff, testy contract negotiations, or a desire to play for a team in a better position to contend for a championship. The script for these trades is predictable: reporters leak discontent; passive-aggressive press conferences commence; podcasts and sports talk shows speculate on possible trade partners and probable destinations; the player begins to miss games or make cryptic social-media posts; and when the trade is executed, sometimes in an unexpected fashion, the breakdown of who won and lost the trade becomes feverish, ravenous, deliciously shortsighted. It’s often impossible to immediately determine who comes out on top in these transactions, considering the unknown value of future draft assets and the uncertainty around player health. What made the Dončić–Davis trade such a bewildering spectacle, aside from the lack of draft picks Dallas received, was the stunning absence of this preamble, and the instantaneous, universal agreement that the Mavericks had been fleeced. Dončić, for his part, never requested a trade; after arriving in L.A., he told the media that he had planned to spend his career with the Mavericks, much like his mentor, Dirk Nowitzki. He mournfully acknowledged that he would “always” call Dallas home.

It is tempting to wonder why nobody in the Mavericks’ organization intervened to prevent the trade from happening. In its aftermath, attention fell to Dumont, who Harrison said green-lit the deal. “When you want to pursue excellence in an organization, you have to make the tough decisions and stand by them and keep going,” Dumont told the Dallas Morning News after the trade, repurposing Harrison’s defense that the “easiest thing for me to do is do nothing”—despite that “nothing” having resulted in an N.B.A. Finals berth just months before. With more time to consider the trade’s magnitude, Dumont developed further justification for it: “We got to the championship games and we didn’t win and so we had to decide: how do we get better?” But Dumont misses the obvious point that the team reached the Finals almost exclusively because of Dončić, and that any decision to improve the team should have been contingent on amplifying his generationally rare skillset.

It now appears that Dumont, clearly no basketball scholar, was had by Harrison’s hubristic delusions, and he’s sought to rectify the embarrassment that’s befallen him and the organization. The day before he fired Harrison, he sat courtside through waves of “Fire Nico” chants. As the third quarter began, he was seen chatting with an eighteen-year-old from Dallas named Nicholas Dickason, who wore a bright-yellow Dončić Lakers jersey in an act of protest. According to reports, Dickason explained to Dumont the destruction of the Dončić trade—namely, the heartbreak incurred by lifelong Mavericks fans, some of whom have disavowed their fandom in protest of the transaction. While there have been far-fetched rumors that Dickason was a plant, an actor tasked with offering Dumont the occasion, and pathos, needed to relieve Harrison of his duties, there’s nonetheless a poetry in how the scene unfolded. Dickason was a child when the team drafted Dončić, and he was likely giddy with the hope that he would spend his adolescence into adulthood rooting for one of the world’s best players. There was no rationale Harrison could have provided that would have convinced a kid like Dickason, let alone an army of diehard, obsessed fans, that abandoning the dream of Luka Dončić was ever worth it. Even if Davis does manage to win a title in Dallas—the only outcome that could even partially mitigate this disaster—it would feel like a betrayal, like toasting to a parent’s second marriage after they had abandoned the family.

One has to look no further than Nowitzki’s turbulent, triumphant career with the Mavericks to understand the mystical properties of sports fandom. As championship-focussed as professional-sports discourse tends to be—“hashtag #rings culture,” baby!—the true joy of rooting for a team is not to simply win a title but to endure the requisite pain before potentially experiencing the thrill of a trophy being hoisted. Nowitzki spent twelve years with Dallas before he brought the city its first Larry O’Brien trophy, in 2011. Before that, in 2006, the team lost a championship in epic fashion to the Miami Heat and, the following year, flamed out in the first round of the playoffs to a far inferior Golden State Warriors team despite the Mavericks owning the league’s best regular-season record and Nowitzki winning the M.V.P. It would’ve been tempting to blame Nowitzki, who was not a lockdown defender himself, for these collapses, for not fulfilling his destiny as a franchise-saving superstar. But when he did finally win a championship, the beauty was irreplicable. He stumbled off the court, holding his jersey over his face on the way to the locker room so that the cameras wouldn’t see him cry. When Harrison traded Dončić, he robbed the city of this possibility. Who’s to say if they’ll ever get it back. ♦