The Mavericks Just Keep On Sending Nico Harrison Out There

Whatever Nico Harrison did that made it so that he would have to destroy himself so publicly rather than just have everyone else do it for him, it must have been a doozy. But even if Harrison did nothing to offend a vengeful deity or the universe at large and has just been the designated corporate crap-catcher for the Dallas Mavericks organization all along, he is out there destroying himself in public all the same. And yet the story of the Luka Doncic trade simply won’t go away, despite the Mavericks themselves having been swept brusquely out of the play-in, solely because the people who run the team keep bringing it up. This suggests that they think Harrison having to eat garbage by the shovelful, on camera and on the record, is good offseason marketing.

That can be the only reason that the Harrison Self-Abasement Tour continues, even to the point that Charles Barkley interrupts TNT’s apology for accidentally killing the still-very-much-alive Billy Ray Bates to tell Harrison, whom Barkley said he “considers a friend,” to stop being a public figure.

The Adelson family, who bought the Mavs from Mark Cuban, presumably wants Harrison to keep face-fronting a story that only serves the franchise poorly for some reason or other. That’s either because they have taken over the team’s P.R. functions and don’t know what they’re doing, or want Harrison to keep getting humiliated for their own amusement, or because the more-wacky-than-facty conspiracy theory that they want to wreck the franchise so they can more readily move it to Las Vegas actually has some legs.

But the central truth here remains: Harrison is doing this career immolation kabuki because he wants to keep the job he has, even though the only possible ending is that he will be fired, and not kindly. There may not even be the boilerplate “We thank him for his service” release language, because the only service Harrison is providing here amounts to taking all the groinings that are rightly owed to team son-in-law-in-chief Patrick Dumont, and all the shame more correctly aimed at owner Miriam Adelson. Already the deflection that has gone on surrounding this poorly conceived and even more poorly executed deal has worked, at least to the point that we are now talking about Harrison rather than Adelson/Dumont, and also that the person who goes out there periodically to keep this two-month-old story alive is still Nico Harrison—and almost surely not by his choice.

Put another way, Barkley’s performative advice for Harrison is both too late and a lost cause. Harrison is choosing to do this because he won’t tell the people who want him to stay public that he’s done doing it. It is curious that he is still the show pony for a deal that he could not have made without the owners’ permission and quite likely made at their behest, but whatever shortcomings Harrison might have as a dealmaker, he is still superb at guzzling the bile for it.

If Harrison has the titanium vertebrae it takes to keep doing the perp walk on a deal that the entire front office had to sign off on, he should be renegotiating his contract to include a massive raise and extension, even though he just did that a year ago before he learned what the job would become. Or maybe that new deal has already happened. Designated villain is not a new role in the world of incalculable wealth; every league commissioner could tell you as much.

True, Harrison’s work in that role might result in the American Airlines Center being burned down to its concrete pillars, but we struggle to understand what else there is in this for him, up to and including “continued employment.” If the presser wasn’t enough humiliation for one day, the long-awaited Tim McMahon takedown at ESPN about Harrison’s paranoiac interoffice skills and borderline-sociopathic bedside manner also happened yesterday. The only way Monday could have been worse for Harrison was if it included a subpoena.

But maybe we are finally approaching the end game for the Doncic story, a tale told so often by now that we pretty much know everything about it save the actual motivations of the Adelsons and the dollar figure that is the going rate for career detonation. Maybe Harrison senses (or has been guaranteed) that there are spectacularly compensated jobs other than basketball team general manager that he might someday perform for the Adelsons.

Maybe there is a money-and-lifestyle figure that comes with being not only a punchline but a universal meme for on-camera poop consumption that can stretch well beyond mere sports and which might last well beyond Doncic’s shelf life as an athlete. Babe Ruth had to save his entire sport for his sale to the New York Yankees in 1919 to become a story that survived the people involved, and Doncic probably isn’t that. But Harrison’s self-perpetuating predicament might be one of those lessons that winds up taught in business classes for decades to come. Nico Harrison is the biggest name in general manager-hood, in none of the ways anyone would ever want that title, and all he had to do was perfect the walk of shame. In that sense, he is an ideal metaphor for the new top-down American bullying culture, where collateral damage is not just a hazard, but sometimes the work product itself.