ing the playoffs less than a year after making it to the NBA Finals. Most of the pressure is being applied to general manager Nico Harrison for trading away Luka Doncic, mainly, but that pressure is being felt by ownership, players, and everyone involved with the team.
Team Governor Patrick Dumont will have a decision to make about Harrison's future with the team, and while that may seem easy to literally everybody else, there are reasons for Dumont to think about it.
Tim Cato of the DLLS network explained what may make it difficult to move on from Harrison in a recent podcast.
"It’s a touch more complicated because it increasingly seems like the decision is either blow up the team and go into a rebuild right now with a new GM [or keep Nico], because there’s reasonable indication that Anthony Davis may not stick around if Nico Harrison is not here.
"…and so when you think about Patrick Dumont , who increasingly looks like the only person who can stop all this momentum heading towards the Mavericks just running everything back next season, which does include Nico Harrison… A choice to move on from Nico would be a choice to move on from pretty much all of what the team thought the next couple seasons was going to mean to them."
While Nico Harrison, views the team as a championship contender when healthy, it's reasonable to question if the team has that kind of ceiling. They don't possess a lot of playmaking or three-point shooting, wiggle room under the tax aprons, or a plethora of tradeable draft capital to improve the roster. And the team may never be fully healthy considering they employ Anthony Davis as the team's best player, with Kyrie Irving coming off an ACL tear.
A rebuild may not be the worst thing; in fact, it may be the team's best option. Dallas doesn't have control over their first-round picks from 2027 to 2030 as well as most of those second-round picks. Trading away Anthony Davis and others with value to recoup some of that lost value may be in the best interest of the team's future, rather than wading into the playoffs with an above-average team that likely doesn't have a championship ceiling. But Dumont may not want to rebuild so soon after making the NBA Finals, or the "championship games," as he called it.
