Mark Cuban Suggests That It Was Nico Harrison Who Ultimately Led The Charge To Squeeze Him Out From Running The Mavs After He Sold The Team
SOPA Images. Getty Images.Now that it's been around 7 months since the infamous Luka Doncic Trade, enough time has gone by where now we get to hear some of the juicy details that went into that whole fiasco. This tends to happen from time to time whenever massive trades or signings happen, and it's especially true when the involved parties include Mark Cuban who is certainly not shy about getting on a mic and telling his side of the story.
One of the major factors of this whole situation was the fact that Cuban was in a way railroaded in terms of what he thought his role would be once he sold his majority stake in the team. From the sounds of it, he was led to believe that he would be able to stay on and run the basketball side, which didn't seem that strange. Why wouldn't the Mavs new ownership group want that? Cuban has been around forever and clearly has had success running the Mavs, so that felt like a no brainer for a new regime that didn't exactly know too much about running a basketball team.
As it turned out, the NBA wouldn't let him put that in writing in the sale (which would later be relevant for both the Celtics and Lakers sales), and that left Nico Harrison to his own devices, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster.
So was it really just as simple as not getting that transition language in the sale documents, or was there more to the story? Let's allow Mark Cuban himself to fill us in
Well if that isn't some Petyr Baelish-type shit, I don't know what is! Nico Harrison going full Littlefinger is not exactly something I knew he was capable of doing, yet if we're to believe Cuban in that clip, that's exactly what happened. Nico clearly had an agenda and a goal, which was to get out of the Luka Doncic business (and hand deliver him to his friend Rob Pelinka), and he knew that if there was going to be a roadblock preventing him from doing that, it was going to be Mark Cuban if he was still around. That man loves Luka more than you love anything in your life, and it's no surprise that Nico Harrison did what he had to do to squeeze him out of any decision-making power
Not that Mavs fans needed any additional ammunition to hate Nico Harrison for the rest of eternity, but I would imagine it doesn't help to learn that he was basically the driving force behind Mark Cuban being stabbed in the back after he sold the team. Given what Cuban did for that franchise and that city, I can't imagine that's going over well. Even if we all figured that was the case when everything first went down, it's still pretty crazy to hear Cuban effectively confirm it was Nico who was holding the knife. That's probably why Cuban was open about how he didn't regret selling the team, but he did regret how he did it
Now, this isn't to say Mark Cuban doesn't have to take some of this on the chin. It was his choice to sell his shares to that particular ownership group. He could have taken the Mavs to the market and found different buyers, maybe a group that didn't believe Nico Harrison actually knew what the hell he was doing. Once that check clears, you basically have to live with whatever they want to do. While it may have blindsided Cuban, he still got billion of dollars for his piece so at the end of the day, that's life in the big city. That's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. When you give up your control in favor of cash, sometimes the new regime ruins everything.
Even knowing that, it still doesn't absolve Nico of his actions. I'm not sure what he has on the new owners, but it has to be pretty bad if they kicked Cuban to the curb and allowed Nico to do whatever he wanted with the team. How's that working out? Sure, the NBA rigged the Lottery and gifted them Cooper Flagg, but we have no idea how that will pan out, and it's not exactly a given that he'll be as good as Luka, who last time I checked, was a generational talent.
Again, this is all something to monitor when it comes to both the Celts and Lakers sale. We already learned that Wyc Grousbeck will stay on as CEO or whatever, but he's no longer the "governor" or the person who gets final say, which is a little different than what was announced when the sale first happened. Jeanie Buss is supposedly "staying on to run things" after getting $10B for the Lakers, but that's probably not exactly how it will play out either. Maybe that's what they knew going in, maybe they were both blindsided with the new reality like Cuban apparently was, but at the end of the day
