Had Mark Cuban remained in charge of the Dallas Mavericks as the majority owner, the Luka Doncic trade would not have happened. Alas, Cuban lost control of the team's basketball operations when he surrendered majority ownership of the team to Patrick Dumont. Dumont then greenlit Nico Harrison's decision to trade Doncic away to the Lakers. Over nine months since making that disastrous trade, Harrison is no longer the Mavericks' general manager — to fans' delight.
Harrison deserves plenty of credit for being one of the loudest voices in the front office when they built the NBA Finals-caliber team around Doncic during the 2023-24 season. But there simply is no recovering from trading away a 26-year-old superstar who's in the middle of his prime for someone with an even more extensive injury history.
Nonetheless, Cuban still has some input on the Mavericks' decision-making, and according to Tim MacMahon of ESPN, he already has a succession plan in place following Harrison's firing. As per MacMahon, Cuban “hopes to hire Dennis Lindsey, the former Utah Jazz vice president and general manager who is the second-highest-ranking member of the Detroit Pistons' front office”.
Lindsey was the Jazz's general manager for seven years before he became the executive vice president for two years. He then moved to an advisory role in 2021 at the behest of owner Ryan Smith. In 2024, Lindsey was hired by the then-floundering Detroit Pistons to serve as their senior vice president of basketball operations.
The veteran executive has a long history of improving his teams. He was the architect of the Jazz roster that became a consistent playoff team towards the end of the 2010s. And now, he's clearly played a huge part in turning around the Pistons' fortunes.
Can he do the same for the Mavericks?
Will the Mavericks look for a hard reset?
Harrison did make plenty of mistakes to end his tenure with the Mavericks, but his roster-building vision was clear. He wanted to build a defensive-minded team that will physically overwhelm the opposition. But all he did was create an injury-prone and imbalanced roster.
The next general manager has some cleaning up to do, and it's not quite clear if Lindsey will be up to this daunting task considering how well he's doing in the Motor City.
