How Mavs GM's deep belief in Kyrie Irving trade has paid off in NBA Finals run (2024)

Joy and redemption filled the far end of the Target Center hallway.

In one corner, near the visiting team’s bus that would take the Dallas Mavericks on their way to an NBA Finals matchup against the Boston Celtics, Luka Dončić was sharing a well-earned beer with his father, Sasa. In another, much closer to the Minnesota locker room, where the Timberwolves were wearing their Western Conference finals defeat after being eliminated in Game 5, third-year Mavs coach Jason Kidd was walking on air toward his road office, where he would soak it all in with his staff.

Mark Cuban, the 65-year-old former majority owner who had rebuilt the Mavs’ front office and coaching staff in the wake of an internal power struggle three years before, posed for pictures with his kids and the Oscar Robertson trophy. Even after selling his majority stake of the team for more than $4 billion to the families who run the Las Vegas Sands corporation in late December, when his 24-year run as the organization’s top decision-maker came to an end, Cuban’s elation remained.

“This is still my team, right, that we put together and (president of basketball operations) Nico (Harrison) put together,” said Cuban, who still has significant influence in his minority owner role. “If I was just a fan on the street, I’d feel the same way.”

And then last, but most certainly not least, there was Kyrie Irving.

When the 32-year-old point guard was done with the postgame news conference where he had reflected on his tumultuous journey, acknowledging the many challenges in his controversial past while proclaiming that “focusing on the future is the best place to be,” he headed straight for the arms of his stepmother and agent, Shetellia Riley Irving, in the hallway. They embraced, then swayed from side to side as the blissful Kyrie began to shout his truth into the night.

A rematch against his old Celtics team, and the furious fans who will no doubt come with it, was up next. But Irving, who so many believed was a bad business and basketball partner for the Mavericks to bet big on after his recent years of controversy, was focused on this far more personal moment.

“They said you were nuts (to work with me),” said Irving, who hired Shetelia as his agent in March 2022, was traded to the Mavericks from Brooklyn nearly a year later and re-signed on a three-year, $126 million deal last summer. “They said you didn’t know your son. … Now we’re on the best stage in the world — the Finals. I love you!”

Cuban, who remains a sideline staple with the Mavericks, reveled in the fact that this move that so many had ridiculed had panned out.

“We knew that with time together, and when you get guys who have something to prove, like Kyrie does, and who are also incredibly talented like Kyrie and Luka, who are trying to win, they know how to get there,” he said.

And get there they have. From their second-half turnaround in the regular season to the first-round playoff win over the star-studded Clippers, a second-round series victory against top-seeded Oklahoma City and this West finals win over the upstart Timberwolves, this Dončić and Irving-led squad was dominant in ways that few, if any, might have predicted.

Yet of all the Mavericks figures who would have been justified for doing a victory lap, it was perfectly fitting that Harrison, the 51-year-old who had been hired at the same time as Kidd in June 2021, was conspicuously absent from the scene.

He was the one whose relationship with Irving, which began when Harrison was a rising executive at Nike and Irving a 16-year-old hooper on his own ascent, was such an X-factor in the trade that ultimately transformed their team.

He was the one who always swore the Dončić-Irving pairing would work so long as Dallas built the roster the right way around them, then proved it by landing two big men at the February trade deadline, P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford, who jumpstarted Dallas’ defense and made the Mavericks elite.

He was the one who endorsed the decision to tank the final two games of the 2022-23 regular season, which led to a $750,000 fine but eventually led to the Mavericks landing rookie sensation Dereck Lively II out of Duke by way of a draft night trade with Oklahoma City.

Since Harrison was lured to head the front office — just nine days after it was announced that former GM Donnie Nelson was out and eight days after longtime coach Rick Carlisle unexpectedly left right behind him — his list of accomplishments has grown quite long. But when it came time to celebrate, and when a Timberwolves executive who wanted to wish Harrison well gave up when he couldn’t find him in that hallway, Harrison’s words from the day before had proved quite prophetic.

“Of course (this season) is gratifying,” said Harrison, sitting in his office at the team’s practice facility the morning after the Mavericks took a 3-0 series lead on the Timberwolves. “Of course it is. But more so, I’m happy for them. I’m happy for the team, happy for Dallas, happy for J-Kidd, more so than me sitting on my perch being gratified.

“I’m not really built like that. I don’t celebrate the wins. I’m thinking about tomorrow. I’m thinking about next year. I’m thinking about three years from now. I don’t stop and smell the roses, which has always been one of my many weaknesses. So for me, if there’s any sense of gratification, it’s for the team.”

And what a team it has turned out to be. But this Mavericks makeover, which has made so many controversies of their past a distant memory, never would have come together if Harrison hadn’t changed his mind about Cuban’s pitch three years ago.

While Harrison had been enjoying good times at Nike, it had been a bad few years for the Mavericks franchise. A 2018 investigation by Sports Illustrated revealed a toxic workplace culture on the business side of the organization, with Cynthia Marshall eventually hired as CEO to overhaul the infrastructure and search for solutions in the wake of so many sexual assault allegations. Cuban would apologize for the whole affair, then give $10 million to women’s groups as part of the punishment that followed the NBA’s seven-month-long investigation.

By the time Harrison was in the running for the top front office job, one Mavericks controversy had merged with another. Nelson, who headed the front office for 16 years and drafted Dončić third in 2018 by way of a sign-and-trade with Atlanta, was fired, in part because of his friction with the team’s then-director of quantitative research and development, Haralabos Voulgaris, that was first reported by The Athletic. Nine months later, Nelson filed a lawsuit,alleging he was fired for reporting that his nephew had been sexually assaulted and harassed by the team’s chief of staff, Jason Lutin (the trial is reportedly set to begin on Dec. 10).

The Mavericks’ legal team issued a response to Nelson’s suit in a court filing, describing his actions as a “lengthy scheme to extort as much as $100 million” from the team. Cuban, in response to the lawsuit, said “everything in that filing is a lie.” When it came to finding Nelson’s replacement, there was a dire need for Cuban to get it right.

But Harrison, a Seattle native who was an All-Big Sky conference standout at Montana State during his three seasons there and played professionally for six seasons overseas, was very comfortable at his old job. He had come up under famed Nike executive Lynn Merritt, growing close with many of the game’s best talents while always looking for the next great player to make a partner. He rose through the ranks to become the company’s vice president of North American basketball operations.

After 19 years at Nike, with Mavericks legends such as Kidd, Dirk Nowitzki (who is now a team adviser) and Michael Finley (who is now Harrison’s vice president of basketball operations) having once been his clients, he had 150 people reporting to him and a family of four that had shown no interest in change.

“I had Nike figured out,” he said. “I had it completely dialed in.”

But then the phone rang. It was a recruiter from the consulting firm Sportsology, which Cuban had employed to head the search after Nelson’s unceremonious exit. After initially declining the invitation to speak with Cuban about the job, he decided to see what the Mavericks owner had to say. They already knew each other from the NBA circles, but Harrison said it wasn’t in any sort of meaningful way.

“We talked for an hour,” Harrison remembered. “He told me his process, which was going to go for a few weeks. And then the next day, he skipped the process and wanted to hire me.

“I think he was just thinking outside the box. And the one thing he always says is that I had a real job. He respected the background that I had at Nike and all the people that were in my organization, managing the budget and all that stuff. He always says, ‘You had a real job. You had a real job.’ So I think that was one of the things.”

For Harrison and his wife, Darlise, the family factor loomed large when it came time to decide. But their youngest daughter, Noelle, was 11 at the time, and their oldest daughter, Nia, was 13, meaning they could both leave Oregon behind and move to Dallas in time to have stability during their high school years. With that in mind, and with Harrison excited to take on this new job that has so many similarities to his old one, he told Cuban he was in.

To see Harrison’s office now is to understand why he had so much confidence that he would be good at this job. On one of the walls that faces his desk, written on mini-magnets that are designed to be moved around like chess pieces, are the names and contract information for all the NBA players who could possibly be in play. The opposing wall features information about draft prospects. Harrison had a similar set-up in his Nike office, where the main objective — making good choices about players with whom to partner and invest — was the same as it is now.

“It’s been a journey,” Harrison said. “(The work) is always hard, right, because you’re dealing with people, and it’s always gonna be hard. But the hard was something that you knew. Then you move into this, and you’re starting from the ground level, and so that … is going to take a few years to kind of get up to speed. But I think getting the job, and hitting the ground running and just diving straight into it, was gonna happen no matter what, if I left.”

The Mavs’ new ownership group made it clear how they feel about Harrison on Tuesday, when he received a multi-year extension that kept him from entering the final year of his deal without a long-term commitment from the organization. Kidd, the former Brooklyn and Milwaukee head coach who was Frank Vogel’s lead assistant with the Lakers before becoming the Mavericks coach, was given an extension as well, in early May. Cuban’s recovery plan, in other words, has been validated in these past few months. And then some.

Yet of all the moves Harrison has made since he arrived, none came with more risk — and ultimately reward — than the one that brought Irving to town.

The position Irving would eventually fill was vacated because of Jalen Brunson’s choice to sign with New York in June 2022, this coming after the Mavericks chose not to offer him an extension before the previous season. A blame game ensued — one in which Cuban claimed that Brunson’s father and current Knicks assistant coach, Rick, was the real reason that Jalen left.

Brunson’s exit came as no surprise, but that didn’t make it any less problematic. In today’s NBA, where superstars like Dončić have no shortage of options should they become disillusioned with their franchise, it behooves the incumbent team to retain the top talent that surrounds such stars. At the time, the Brunson blunder was a significant mark on Harrison’s early tenure.

But Dončić signed his five-year, supermax extension seven weeks later, allaying those fears of his possible discontent. Still, with Brunson gone and big man Kristaps Porziņģis looking nothing like his former All-Star self during his two-plus injury-riddled seasons in Dallas, it was clear that Harrison still had plenty of roster work to do.

They needed another star.

To hear the Mavericks’ key figures look back on the Irving decision now, you’d never know that there was any reason to wonder if it would work. Never mind that Irving had spent the majority of his recent years embroiled in controversy.

The future Hall of Famer had often been unavailable during his three-plus seasons with the Nets. The reasons, in addition to a series of serious injuries, ranged from his stance on the COVID vaccine (and the league’s requirement for players to take it) to various absences for personal reasons to the eight-game suspension he served for his initial lack of willingness to apologize after posting a tweet that promoted an antisemitic film.

During his three full seasons in Brooklyn, from 2019 to 2022, Irving played in just 45.5 percent of the Nets’ regular season games (103 of 226). By early November 2022, when The Athletic conducted an anonymous poll of front office executives to forecast Irving’s uncertain future, one general manager even predicted that he “might not play in the NBA again.”

But on Feb. 5, 2023, two months after Nike announced its decision to end its 12-year partnership with Irving because of the backlash surrounding his tweet and two days after his trade request from Brooklyn had gone public, the Mavs outbid the Lakers, Clippers and Suns to land him. And Harrison, who had spent all those years working as one of Irving’s primary point men within the shoe company and had a unique bond with him because of their shared relationship with the late Kobe Bryant, was ecstatic to provide a fresh, new start.

“Honestly, (the confidence) was just the fact that I know Kyrie,” Harrison said. “I know his character, and I know how talented he is. So you have a guy like Luka, who is telling you that he’s ready to win. And he’s telling you, and then he’s showing it on the court. And then to win, you’ve got to surround him with enough high-level talent.

“You can’t just get talent like (Irving). It’s not out there. Think of how many guys in the league who are available that are that talented. It just doesn’t happen. So we were fortunate that Kyrie became available. For me, I didn’t listen to the outside noise because I have my own relationship with him. … I have my own relationship. J-Kidd has his own relationship. And we know the culture that we’re building here. So it really didn’t come into play.”

Irving’s recent play and availability, however, clearly did. During those first three months of the 2022-23 regular season, when Irving earned his eighth All-Star nomination and his ticket out of Brooklyn, he had averaged 26.8 points, 5.1 rebounds, 5.2 assists and one steal while playing in 32 of the 35 games with the Nets that followed his suspension. It was, in their eyes, a reminder that the player who won a title with Cleveland alongside LeBron James in 2016 and made three Finals appearances in all with the Cavaliers was just as elite as ever.

“I think we had to look past the noise,” Kidd said.“Like, we’re talking about Kai the basketball player. The noise is the noise. It could be good noise, bad noise, but you just have to look at what you feel fits on the floor. And that’s all I think we looked at.”

Cuban shared nearly identical messaging.

“You know, in this business — and every business, really — you’ve got to just block out all the social media experts and just go with who you are,” Cuban said during his post-Game 5 celebration. “Yeah, (the noise around Irving) was different. But that’s the easiest stuff to block out. When they talk about someone’s personality, or this and that, and then you see Kai and how he interacts with players from around the league, everybody loved him.”

But not everybody loved the deal, especially when it fell so flat at the start.This wasn’t an overnight success, of course — not even close.

The Mavs, who were 29-26 before Irving’s post-trade debut, went just 9-18 down the stretch of the 2022-23 season. Irving played in 20 of the 27 games, Dončić played in 19, and Dallas had the league’s 27th-best defensive rating during that span (the Mavs were 10th in offense). The media and fan skepticism, which was already at a healthy enough level when the deal went down, grew even more. But as Harrison had predicted, it finally clicked when he changed the players around Dončić and Irving.

There had been mistakes made in the process, from the Brunson situation to the trade for restricted free agent Grant Williams last July. The willingness to make the hard pivot, like the Mavs did when they sent Williams to the Hornets (along with Seth Curry, and a top-two protected first-round pick in 2027) just eight months after he arrived last summer to get Washington at February’s trade deadline, would prove to be a pivotal part of their plan. And by the time early March arrived, it all came together.

From March 7 on, after Dallas had dropped five of six games and fallen to 34-28, the Mavs had the league’s best defense, 12th-best offense and the fifth-best net rating (while going 16-4). The Western Conference, it was clear, had itself a new contender.

But in addition to all of the obvious on-court factors, from the brilliance of their superstar backcourt to the new supporting cast that was such a better fit, Dallas’ players and coaches say it was Irving’s uplifting spirit and leadership all throughout this season that put them over the top.

“Kai’s been a great leader throughout the whole time I’ve been here,” Washington said.“We know that he’s been here before. All of this isn’t new to him, and it’s new for all of us. So he guides us through everything we need help with. He’s that voice for us. He’s a fun guy to be around, a fun guy to play with, and he makes the game easier for all of us.”

According to several members of the team’s basketball operations staff, Irving has grown more vocal over time in this Mavericks role. And by the time this playoff run arrived, he had long since become the most influential of them all in the locker room, according to Washington.

“He has had something to say after every game,” Washington said. “I think the best (moment) was in LA, after our first playoff game (in the first round, a 109-97 loss to the Clippers). He texted the group, just saying ‘Stick together. It’s only the beginning. It’s only gonna get harder from here.’ It’s having those encouraging words from him that makes everybody play better and feel better about themselves. Obviously, he’s a superstar. He’s an icon. So for him to put the confidence in us just makes us feel 10 times better. He’s a leader in every way possible.”

After those ill-fated years in Boston, and the Nets chapter in which Irving acknowledged on Monday he wasn’t his “best self,” the Mavericks experience has been exceedingly positive. And the two-way trust, which bears such a stark contrast to the dynamics that led to his Brooklyn exit, is playing a big part.

“There came a time when he had to make decisions for himself and his family, and that happened in New York,” said veteran forward Markieff Morris, who was with Irving two seasons ago in Brooklyn. “I felt like the organization had seen it one way, and (Irving) had seen it another way. So with his business mind, he said ‘No, this is not gonna work for me, because we don’t see eye-to-eye.’

“(But) everything happens for a reason, man, and Kai is a firm believer in that. He’s a firm believer in his faith. He’s a firm believer in doing all the right things, and I think this is the perfect place for him to be himself.”

When Irving takes the TD Garden floor in Game 1 of the Finals on Thursday, the boos will no doubt cascade from the rafters. The locals haven’t forgotten how he said he would re-sign with the Celtics in October 2018, only to sign with the Nets the following summer. They remember that he burned sage before tipoff in his first game back, a move that he later explained was meant to “cleanse the energy” in the building.

They certainly won’t forget the ugliness that unfolded on May 30, 2021, when he stepped on their beloved halfcourt logo afterward, had a water bottle thrown at him by a fan (who was later arrested) and highlighted “underlying racism” as a root cause of it all afterward. Ditto for the playoff rematch a year later, when Irving gave the Celtics crowd the middle finger in the first-round series opener and was later fined $50,000. But he’s in a better place now, leading this Dallas team that looks fully capable of upsetting his old squad while changing the way he’s viewed along the way.

Kyrie appeared to step on the Boston logo as he greeted his teammates at half court postgame.

(via @yornoc74) pic.twitter.com/thcXjX15He

— ESPN (@espn) May 31, 2021

“Everyone’s gonna have a past,” Irving said in his news conference after the Game 5 win over Minnesota. “Everyone’s gonna be judged for that. But I think putting your best foot forward and focusing on the future is the best place to be. All the stories and narratives are going to exist forever. I’m sure I’ll hear it until I retire.

“I’ve been there for these guys. They’ve been there for me. I’ve told them some very intimate things, some very vulnerable things, about who I am and what I’ve dealt with. And they’ve been able to really shower me with the support and love that’s needed — for any human being. … They really protect me and I protect them. That’s all I’ve ever asked for is from an organization and my teammates, is for them to protect me the same way I protect them, because I go out of my way to speak good things about people, to be in the right place for them, and to understand that human emotions get the best of you, but how you respond is how you’re going to be remembered.”

The question now, one that Irving and the rest of the Mavericks hope is answered in the affirmative soon, is whether they can go from the makeover to the NBA’s mountaintop. And Harrison, now just the same as back then, has a belief that’s born out of the way this all began.

“I’m super happy for (Irving) — I really am,” Harrison said. “I think being in the right environment, and the right culture, matters. And players are gonna thrive in the right environment. You put players in the right environment, put good people in the right environment, they’re gonna thrive.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Getty; Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE, Tim Heitman / NBAE)