I got the text in the middle of the night.
Bro, I thought this was a joke.
The “joke” my friend was referring to was encapsulated in another alert on my phone. The Dallas Mavericks had traded away their superstar point guard Luka Doncic.
I sat up in bed and reread the alert. There had been no indication this was coming. But then again, there was no reason it couldn’t happen.
Yes, Doncic was one of the best basketball players in the world, in the prime of his career. But even those elite players had a price – usually another superstar and a boatload of draft picks.
But glancing over the alert a third time, I found no indication of such a return. Yes, there was another superstar coming back to Dallas – an older one with a lower ceiling. But the rest of the return was a role player and a solitary draft pick.
The value exchange seemed nowhere near even. For all intents and purposes, the Mavericks had given away a generational player.
Roughly 12 hours later, Mavericks General Manager Nico Harrison sat in front of reporters, attempting to explain the move he’d just made.
Harrison spoke about the team’s desire to win a championship, after having fallen short several months earlier. And he emphasized the importance of bringing in players who could add to the team’s culture.
It was quite the theory. But it was already clear that most Mavericks fans weren’t buying it.
Many had already spewed vitriol online. Others had staged a mock funeral for Doncic’s Dallas tenure – complete with a casket – on the plaza outside the team’s arena. A memorial shrine to the superstar had blossomed nearby.
One of the reporters highlighted this to Harrison, who replied that the fans would come around once the team won a championship.
And if they didn’t win one in the next few years?
Well, they’ll bury me then, Harrison replied.
He was wrong. They already had.
I’ve lived in the Dallas area for many years. And I still find myself amazed by the misconceptions the region contends with.
There are still the lingering stereotypes of Big Hair and Trophy Wives from the 1980s. There are still the Land of Steakhouses and Strip Clubs claims. And there are the reductive barbs about the region being filled with a sea of snobs in their Mercedes.
But the one that gets me riled up the most is the claim that Dallas is a winner’s town.
Now, this reductive claim holds true across most large southern cities. While all of America is captivated by success, there seems to be a more ruthless demand for it in the Sunbelt – particularly when it comes to professional sports. If a team struggles to win in Atlanta, Tampa, Miami, Houston, Phoenix, or Charlotte, there’s a good chance fans will stop packing the stands.
On the face of it, this can appear true in Dallas too. When the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Stars struggled in baseball and hockey, respectively, it wasn’t hard to spot empty seats around the ballpark or the arena.
But that hasn’t proved true at all for the Dallas Mavericks. For a generation, fans have packed the stands for each game. And they’ve proudly worn their replica basketball jerseys around town.
Some of this can be attributed to sustained success on the court. The Mavericks made the postseason in 20 of the first 25 seasons of this millennium, winning a championship in one of those seasons.
But the city’s lovefest with the Mavericks has more to do with two names – Dirk Nowitzki and Luka Doncic.
Each arrived in Texas from Europe to play basketball for the club — 20 years apart. And as each developed into a superstar on the court, they came of age off it — in the same community that filled the stands at the arena.
Nowitzki and Doncic only shared the court for one season. But that year felt like a passing of a torch.
Doncic saw how Dallas embraced Nowitzki wholeheartedly — how the city viewed him as a key strand of their fabric, rather than just a great basketball star. And he took strides to follow in those footsteps.
Indeed, Luka Doncic was core to the culture of Dallas. He was in rap songs and on billboards. He enthusiastically gave his time and energy to community service around town. He willingly mingled at local establishments with the masses who picked the stands at his games.
He was a man of the city. He was the city.
Until Harrison shipped him away in the dead of the night.
In the business world, there’s plenty of discussion about culture.
Maintaining a strong corporate culture is paramount. So is understanding the culture of consumers.
If either process is broken, a company will leak oil. Progress will be halted, and viability will become a concern.
Nico Harrison knows this well. He previously was an executive at Nike — a company lauded for harnessing both sides of the equation.
And yet, he somehow failed to follow those principles in Dallas.
Perhaps, yes, the Dallas Mavericks internal culture could be improved by a personnel shakeup. For all his greatness, Doncic did have deficiencies on defense. And he complained to the referees far too often.
But by ignoring the effects such a move would have on the associated consumer culture, Harrison failed. He failed himself, he failed the Mavericks, and he failed the city of Dallas.
And when Harrison inferred that local fans embrace championship rings more than the players who earn them, he made himself an eternal pariah.
All of this has far-reaching consequences.
There’s no doubt that the Mavericks’ brand has been degraded by this culture flub, and its connection to the city is in tatters. Harrison himself has unfortunately faced death threats, and the coffee shop where he started the clandestine trade talks has become terra non grata.
There are still chapters to be written, of course. Maybe the new players connect with the Dallas community and become part of its culture – all while delivering a title to the city. Maybe a new hope rises – Star Wars style – and becomes the next Nowitzki or Doncic.
But regardless of what transpires, a cloud will remain over the Mavericks organization.
The franchise got the city of Dallas wrong. They got the rules of culture wrong.
And that won’t ever be forgotten.