Nico Harrison was done with the Mavericks the day he traded Luka Dončić; he just didn't know it

Nico Harrison's legacy is cemented as the guy who traded Luka Dončić. Patrick Dumont, who, as the son-in-law of Mavericks majority owner Miriam Adelson, serves as the team's governor, definitely signed off on the deal and should not be spared a single ounce of ridicule, but sons-in law of owners don't get fired. General managers do. 

On Tuesday, Dumont and the Mavericks made it official. Harrison is out. Canned. Fired. And rightfully so. Nobody wants to celebrate someone losing their job, but this isn't a normal situation. Harrison isn't going to be standing in any soup lines and he had a massive responsibility to captain an organizational ship that was carrying the most precious kind of homegrown superstar cargo that comes along once in a generation, if not a lifetime. 

All he had to do was make sure the thing stayed on course. 

Instead, he sunk it. 

Mavericks fire Nico Harrison: General manager ousted less than a year after Luka Dončić trade

Sam Quinn

There's a Titanic reference to be made here, but at least the iceberg it hit was mostly invisible. Anyone who couldn't see, clear as day, the disaster that trading Dončić would be was basketball blind. No less, Harrison did it for an utterly ridiculous return, laughably low even by the moronic standards of that one fantasy football guy who thinks he's just outsmarted everyone else by swapping prime Tom Brady for some flex-player flavor of the week.

Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and one first-round draft pick? For Luka freaking Dončić? This is not hindsight is 20-20 stuff. There is no chance a 25-year-old superstar, who didn't demand the trade and who is well on his way to being one of the greatest players of all time, will ever be hung out on that kind of clearance rack again. 

He never should've been for sale in the first place. But at least if you're going to mount your "defense wins championships" high horse, list the guy on the open market. Harrison could have cleaned up. All-Star guys. Future draft picks. The whole nine. Instead, he got a couple scraps and an always-injured 31-year-old who, wouldn't you know it, wound up injured in his first game with the Mavericks and is currently sidelined with a bum Achilles as we speak. 

To be fair, Harrison hasn't gotten a fair shake at seeing his vision through. He knew the risks of Davis' health and Kyrie Irving's age and willingly signed up for an incredibly short title window in which everything had to go perfectly. But in the interest of equitable representation, had Irving not blown his ACL and if by some miracle Davis and everyone else had stayed healthy, the Mavericks were set up to be pretty damn good in a short-term setting.

But hey, life, and certainly the NBA, is about results, and this thing went in the tank immediately. Somehow, the Mavericks, with a 1.8% chance, lucked into the top pick in June's draft, when they took another potential franchise icon in Cooper Flagg. Right away, Harrison, with absolutely no shame at all, began spinning his "I think the fans are finally starting to see the vision" yarn. 

Sorry, bud. You don't get to claim credit for Cooper. You pitched a team that was ready to win a title, not the first overall pick by way the friendliest and most forgiving ping-pong ball on the planet. And even with Flagg, the Mavericks are a mess. Harrison, over a cup of coffee, ripped the organization's heart out and insisted it would come out stronger. 

That's not how transplants work, especially not when the replacement organ is way older and historically less healthy than the original one. I'm not a Mavericks fan. I have no emotional ties to the trade. And yet I'm still infuriated by it. The ego of it all. It's unfortunate that Dumont gets to keep his job. He could have said no to Nico. He's just as much to blame. Who knows who else had a role in letting that trade happen?

But in the end, it's Harrison's cross to bear. It's his legacy. There are conflicting ideas about the degree to which Harrison, a former Nike executive, was at least partly (if not largely) responsible for screwing up Stephen Curry's sales pitch by calling him "Seth" and leaving Kevin Durant's pictures in a seemingly copied-and-pasted presentation. For a long time that blunder hung over him. Not anymore. Trading Dončić is an unfixable, go-on-your-tombstone type mistake that will define him for the rest of his professional life. 

The Mavericks will try to move on with Flagg and my guess is they're sitting in their big-wig offices right now repeating "just wait until Davis and Irving come back healthy" again and again. They still think they can come out of this thing relatively clean just because they scrubbed themselves of their dirtiest public face. 

They can't. This is the kind of thing that puts a spell on an organization. This is Curse of the Bambino stuff. Yes, in a twisted way, I realize that Flagg is a part of this deal in the sense that they would never have been in position to draft him without dealing Dončić. That kind of fortune is not in keeping with a curse. But I don't believe in lightning striking twice. Getting Flagg was a matter of survival. He's the dinghy the Mavericks had to pile into as the ship sunk. And if they're not careful, the dinghy is going to sink, too.

The Mavericks have to change course. Every other part of the Dončić trade that remains in the Dallas DNA has to go. It started with Harrison, and if logic prevails, it will continue with Davis and Irving and right on down the role-player line. 

It's a shame. It didn't have to be this way. Dallas was in the Finals two years ago. Dončić was 25 years old. It was all in front of them. But Harrison just couldn't stay out of his own way. He had to be smarter than the rest of the basketball world. He didn't know it, but he was done the second he made that trade. It just took some time to make it official.