The Athletic's profile of Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison will change no minds re: his role in the exile of Luka Doncic, but at least we saw this side of him: He seems like the kind of person you would do anything to avoid talking to at a party. Or maybe you find this paragraph a sign of a good friend:
Harrison is a notorious nutrition devotee and will occasionally begin conversations by quizzing friends on their health habits. "What did you eat today?" is one of his go-to greetings.
How he hasn't been beaten to death with a gravy ladle before this is a testimonial to the essential laziness of the NBA executive class.
But as an anecdote that helps flesh out the cardboard villain who made the universally condemned deal that sent Doncic to Los Angeles in exchange for the franchise's fan base and goodwill, it explains much. Harrison has been taking all the heat for a decision that must surely have been approved and maybe even instigated by an ownership group that includes this guy:
Being an annoying food cop fits in with the narrative that Doncic was traded out of fear that he would eat his way out of the league while making $69 million per year until 2030.
The story tries to explain why Harrison made the Doncic trade by talking only to longtime pal and business confederate Rob Pelinka, instead of seeking out a bidding war that surely would have given him a full set of trading options. In fact, it does explain it but doesn't exonerate him for it. His paranoia about secrecy, which is helpful in some aspects of his job, fails completely here unless he was specifically told by the guy above, team governor Patrick Dumont, or his mother-in-law and actual team owner Miriam Adelson, to get rid of Doncic as quickly as possible, return be damned. If the owner tells you to wreck your team, well, you head for a roof. But if, as the story tries to explain, this is how Harrison does his business, then he's in the wrong business. General managers need people skills, even if one of those skills is duplicity, and Harrison seems to be low on trust until he finds someone worthy of that trust and then is remarkably transparent. "One person from a rival front office that has talked trades with Harrison described him as 'almost too honest,'" the story reads. "His goal, the person said, is to build a relationship with the other team, acting as forthright as possible."
This is backward in the trade market, when the goal is not only to get rid of something you don't want but to convince the person you're dealing with that you desperately want to keep it. Or, in the alternative, to lie about all the other teams who want the thing you don't want. It is a job for forthright and honorable people until it becomes a job for swindlers, con men and ski-mask fanciers. Harrison inverted the process in the Doncic deal, which makes the deal that much less popular outside the Metroplex. Within it, he has succeeded only in becoming more infamous than Dallas' other franchise face/GM, Jerry Jones.
It does, though, explain the motivation to decouple from Doncic in general, given that Harrison seems to be a nutritional prude and Doncic a caloric libertine. It explains why Miriam and Pat would sign off on a deal that has made the Mavs less popular at the moment than not only the Cowboys but the Stars, Rangers, and maybe even the Wings as well. Even karma has weighed in, taking out Anthony Davis, Dereck Lively and Daniel Gafford to injury and leaving the Mavs without the raison d'etre for the deal in the first place. If the universe is telling you this quickly that your greatest brainstorm only managed to take out the barn and half the house, you don't have enough home insurance to save yourself.
Harrison is quoted at the end of the story providing his epitaph from the press conference announcing the trade:
“The easiest thing for me is to do nothing," Harrison said to reporters. "Everyone would praise me for doing nothing. We really believed in it. Time will tell if I’m right."
Nahhh. He's already wrong, even if it turns out that Doncic does eat, drink, and smoke his way into competitive inertia before the end of his next contract. He did the deal the wrong way, may have done it with the wrong team, and tossed his reputation toward the metaphorical flaming dumpster. What he succeeded in doing was to make himself the designated scapegoat if and when Miriam and Pat decide there's too much heat without the benefit of making himself appealing to other potential employers. He cannot even live in hope that Doncic's demise due to belt size happens as quickly as the Mavericks', providing us with the most schadenfreud-tastic of results: the trade that totally rogers both teams. However it plays out, we know this beyond dispute: Nico Harrison will eat alone.
