The man who traded Luka Dončić: How Mavericks GM Nico Harrison operates

Just over two weeks ago, a stunning trade launched an NBA executive relatively unknown outside basketball circles into the wider public consciousness.

Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison’s decision to send 25-year-old Luka Dončić to the league’s glitziest franchise on Feb. 2 was largely unprecedented in sports history, and reaction was swift and deafening: crowds mourning in front of the team’s home arena with a casket, others pledging to cancel season tickets and unfollow the team on social media in droves. Power brokers around the league were bewildered. Conspiracy theories were launched about the franchise’s relatively new ownership group angling to move the team, which commissioner Adam Silver went as far as dispelling during All-Star Weekend. But Harrison has largely remained the center of the scorn. Who is this guy? And why would he do this?

The move itself was so well-guarded that no one — save for select members of the Mavs’ and Los Angeles Lakers’ front offices — knew a trade for the ages was coming. Even the Utah Jazz, pulled into the deal for logistical reasons, was left in the dark about the superstar exchange until just before it was finalized.

Harrison has always been able to keep a secret. Three decades ago, Harrison didn’t even tell his mother something eminently important, all because he had been asked to keep quiet.

In 1992, Harrison was a defensive-minded forward who transferred from West Point to Montana State, a school closer to his home in the Pacific Northwest. Toward the end of a required redshirt year, he approached his coach, Mick Durham, with an uncomfortable question. His family couldn’t afford another year of out-of-state tuition. Could he receive a scholarship moving forward?

Durham told him yes, he could, but because it was too far out from the next semester, the change couldn’t yet become official. He asked Harrison to “keep that to yourself until things sort out,” Durham remembered.

Two weeks later, Harrison’s mother called the coach.

“We have to know if (Nico) is going to get a scholarship or not,” she said, completely unaware of the pact between her son and Durham. “We can’t afford this.”

Those who have observed the rise of the 52-year-old Nike executive-turned-NBA team builder say Harrison is disciplined and fitness-focused; that he is even-keeled and not easily swayed by emotion; and that he is so tight-lipped, only those on a need-to-know basis are kept informed of the facts.

Even as the public has learned some of why the Mavs made this Dončić trade — from Harrison’s frustrations with Dončić’s conditioning and off-court habits, his yearning for a better defender and his tight relationship with incoming star Anthony Davis — the decision remains nonetheless viewed by much of the public as irrational and impulsive.

But those who know Harrison best paint a far different portrait of his process.

“Nico is really thoughtful,” said Rachel Baker, who worked with Harrison at Nike and is now the general manager of Duke men’s basketball. “I wouldn’t say he has an impulsive bone in his body.”

In his four years in charge of the Mavericks, Harrison hasn’t been afraid to take big swings. Two years ago, the team traded for Kyrie Irving when the mercurial guard’s stock was at an all-time low.

“I don’t see any risk at all,” Harrison, who declined to speak to The Athletic for this story, explained in a news conference at the time. “I actually see risk in not doing it.”

More than two decades earlier, Harrison was a pharmaceutical sales rep looking to break into the sneaker industry.

While at the Portland International Airport waiting to fly to Philadelphia for the 2002 All-Star Game, he spotted Ralph Greene Jr. The men did not know each other beyond knowing of each other. Harrison grew up not far from the city where Nike is headquartered, Beaverton, Ore., and had gone on to play pro hoops, bouncing around leagues in Belgium, Japan and the U.S. Greene was then the global marketing director for basketball at Nike, the most powerful company in athletics.

So, Harrison, a man whose life philosophy includes willing good fortune into existence, approached Greene.

“Hey, you work at Nike?” he asked.

Greene confirmed he did. Harrison asked what he did. When Greene said he worked in basketball, Harrison told him he wanted to do that, too. Harrison found the right way into the conversation, dropping the name of a coworker that unlocked the usually tight-lipped Greene.

Dressed in a couture tracksuit and armed with the right words, Harrison quickly made an impression on Greene, who gave him his number.

“Most times you do that,” Greene said, “you don’t hear from people again.”

However, Harrison was hired at Nike by the next NBA season. Greene’s unexpected presence had created a connection that provided a gateway back into basketball.

“He was just smooth,” Greene said. “He’s very collected. That’s what I like about him, always have.”

Nike’s NBA player representatives call themselves “The Seals,” a reference to the elite Navy special operations unit. The military terminology does not stop there. Operating above the Seals is Lynn Merritt, the high-ranking executive most famous for signing Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, who is known by his team as “The General.”

That crew, which for years included Harrison, prefers to operate in silence. The player reps act as liaisons between basketball stars and the premier athletic brand. In Harrison’s case, he was the middleman between Nike and, most famously, Bryant, though he worked with other top-tier players, too, including Davis and Irving. He helped Nike sign Ja Morant, Devin Booker, Jayson Tatum and more. But his time at Nike also is tarred by a failed pitch to keep Steph Curry with the brand; it went horribly, and Curry left for Under Armour and lifted that company to prominence.

There was another person of note he persuaded to hop on board, too: Dončić, a Nike athlete when Harrison helped manage it. Eventually, the Slovenian guard moved to Jordan Brand, which Nike owns, with Harrison again playing a role in that decision.

At Nike, the Seals had a secret handshake. It includes at least two or three daps. The Athletic is not privy to the intricacy of the greeting, given the true confidentiality of how Seals, even ones at an athletic apparel brand, slither behind the scenes.

“(Harrison) maintained the position of secrecy a lot,” a source who worked with him at Nike said. “He wouldn’t really tell you his plan until he needed you to be a part of his plan.”

Lakers vice president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka, Bryant’s former agent, earned Harrison’s trust long before the Dončić-for-Davis exchange. When Harrison was Bryant’s Nike rep, the three would travel the world together. When he was considering dealing Dončić, Harrison didn’t want the entire NBA to learn of his interest in sending out one of the sport’s elite performers, so Harrison presented the idea to his friend whose lips he knew would stay zipped. He told Pelinka on Jan. 7 at a Dallas coffee shop.

Harrison worried that a disastrous environment could form inside the organization if the Mavs’ willingness to deal Dončić became public. A disgruntled star, as the Miami Heat just learned with Jimmy Butler, can cause headaches. Harrison contacted at least one non-Lakers team about flipping Dončić for another star, but he entered negotiations only with L.A., league sources told The Athletic. At a post-trade news conference, he praised Pelinka for keeping their talks quiet in the weeks leading up to an agreement, though silence was in the Lakers’ best interest, too. Why should they blab to the rest of the league, only to create a bidding war for Dončić?

Since the completion of the trade, other lead executives have privately vented they could have bested the Lakers’ offer, one that didn’t even include all of Los Angeles’ top chips. Their teams were left in the dark, unlike how it normally goes when a generational performer hits the market. But the way this trade went down was on brand for Harrison, who had deliberated it with staffers in his front office for weeks.

“He’s willing to make the audacious choice if he believes it serves the greater mission,” said Jian Allen, who worked closely with Harrison at Nike. “That being said, he’s one of the (most) measured risk-takers I’ve ever met. There’s nothing about Nico that is haphazard or reckless.”

When Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon in 2013, Harrison wanted to send him a public message of support. In the aftermath of the injury, the company took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that gave a rundown of Bryant’s accomplishments and implored him to “Show Us Again.”

Nike had always run its ad campaigns involving the Lakers superstar by the persnickety Bryant for approval. But no one put this ad before Bryant before it dropped. Harrison wanted him to discover it on his own.

In the case of Dončić, the Mavs GM had cultural concerns, ones that are now well-documented, about the conditioning and lifestyle choices of a guard who can post 30-point triple-doubles but who also didn’t exude the everyday values Harrison required.

Harrison worked alongside Bryant for years, witnessing “The Mamba Mentality” firsthand, but he’s not merely plagiarizing one of the greatest ever. This also is Harrison’s character.

“He’s that disciplined and detailed,” said Danny Sprinkle, a college teammate of Harrison who is now the head coach at the University of Washington.

Harrison is a notorious nutrition devotee and will occasionally begin conversations by quizzing friends on their health habits. “What did you eat today?” is one of his go-to greetings.

His father worked at an aluminum plant for 30 years, and Harrison has said he missed just one day of work. Jerry Olson, a former Montana State assistant with whom Harrison grew close, remembers a roommate complaining of Harrison — who had been a medical sciences major and initially had ambitions of becoming a doctor — that “all he does is study.”

Harrison worked his way up at Nike from a sports marketing rep to a high-ranking exec. He earned the trust of Bryant and was responsible for making bets on talent the company should invest in. His career there prepared him to run an NBA front office.

Harrison always shared a mutual respect with the San Antonio Spurs, which by no coincidence had a star named Tim Duncan, who lacked flash and went by the nickname of “The Big Fundamental.” He worked with the organization’s Hall of Fame point guard Tony Parker while at Nike and grew close with defensive stopper Bruce Bowen.

The Spurs considered adding Harrison to their front office in 2016 after they lost two assistant general managers that year, when Sean Marks went to the Brooklyn Nets and Scott Layden headed to the Minnesota Timberwolves, but Harrison ended up remaining at Nike until Mark Cuban brought him to Dallas in 2021.

Dončić, who joined the Mavs in 2018, presented a different type of mentality from Bryant. Dončić drinks beer and smokes a hookah, neither of which is atypical for a 25-year-old. But those behaviors didn’t fit Harrison’s mold.

Questions about the organization’s ability to hold Dončić accountable followed.

Management unsuccessfully pushed him to get into better shape, even as he dominated the league, averaging at least 27 points, at least eight rebounds and at least eight assists during each of the five seasons following his first in the NBA. Dončić controlled more day-to-day decisions than the average player does, such as practice schedules, though superstars on other teams receive similar treatment.

“Every person who worked at the Mavericks, except for me, was terrified of this guy,” Haralabos Voulgaris, a Mavericks executive from 2018 to 2021, said of Dončić on the podcast “My First Million.”

Voulgaris told a story about interacting with Dončić during his rookie season. Dončić filled a thermos with lemonade and sweet tea. “I know liquid calories are death,” Voulgaris told then-owner Cuban. Voulgaris, according to his recounting, was told to stay in his lane.

(In a response to those comments, Cuban told The Athletic, “Bob has always talked a good game.”)

Harrison, seen with then-majority owner Mark Cuban in 2021, was brought over from Nike by Cuban. The former owner has distanced himself from the decision to trade Dončić. (Glenn James / NBAE via Getty Images)

In November, Dončić missed five games with what the Mavericks announced as a right wrist sprain. That injury classification was not entirely true. In reality, Dončić was supposed to use time off to improve his conditioning, team sources said.

Dallas might have worried about Dončić’s body, but until a recent calf ailment, he had never missed significant time because of injury. This will be his first season playing fewer than 60 games. (On the other side, Davis is six years his elder and has failed to compete in 60 games during four of the previous six seasons. Considering the injury he suffered during his first game with the Mavericks, he could miss that landmark again in 2024-25.)

Nonetheless, concern built, including with Harrison, that Dončić’s body would break down possibly sooner than anyone would suspect. It eventually reached a point where Harrison felt he had to move on from someone who could still one day be a league MVP.

The decision appears to have been largely his to make. When Cuban hired Harrison, the then-owner had a significant say in basketball personnel decisions. That changed after Cuban sold his majority stake in the Mavericks to the Adelson family in December 2023. In the year-plus since, Harrison has become the organization’s undisputed chief basketball decision-maker. At an event with former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates earlier this month, Cuban made it clear he didn’t support the decision to trade Dončić. Harrison said team governor Patrick Dumont “laughed” when he first presented the idea to trade Dončić, but the team moved forward in the end.

“I know it’s a really unpopular decision,” Olson said. “It may not work out. But I trust him. I told him, ‘I’m proud of you.’ ”

Had he remained in Dallas, Dončić would have been eligible to sign a five-year, $345 million contract. The estimation from the outside, one that The Athletic confirmed once the trade was completed, was that he wanted to re-up with the organization for the long term in July. Dončić said as much when he arrived for his introduction in Los Angeles.

But there was one twist: The Mavericks were never going to offer Dončić that mega-deal, league sources said. And a general manager identifying one star to trade, negotiating with only one GM he knows and trusts and targeting only one player who he’s worked with before and whose character he can vouch for — just as Harrison did with Dončić, Pelinka and Davis — was no accident.

Those who know Harrison best insist that once he trusts someone, he turns transparent as glass.

One person from a rival front office who has talked trades with Harrison described him as “almost too honest.” His goal, the person said, is to build a relationship with the other team, acting as forthright as possible.

“It’s, can we have a conversation, discuss stuff that I don’t have to read about immediately? Can I trust him?” the exec said. “And Nico has always been very honest. He’s a very upfront person, a straight-shooter.”

Harrison, shown with Mavs center Dereck Lively II, head coach Jason Kidd and Dončić during the WNBA playoffs in October, had grown wary of Dončić’s conditioning issues and feared a breakdown of the superstar’s body. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

The morning after dealing Dončić, Harrison addressed his team in Cleveland, sources with knowledge of the meeting told The Athletic. Harrison told the bleary-eyed group that the team’s goal remained the same: Win a championship. Privately and publicly, Harrison has said he moved Dončić for Davis because he felt it gave Dallas the best chance at raising the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Harrison believes that Davis is a better cultural fit for what the Mavericks want to build.

“There are people who fit the culture and people who come in and add to the culture,” Harrison said in a news conference after the deal. “Those are two distinct things. I believe the people who are coming in are adding to the culture.”

When Harrison traded Dončić to the Lakers, negotiating with only the trusted Pelinka, he chose not to hold out for every tidbit Los Angeles could throw in a deal, most notably leaving 18-point scorer Austin Reaves, rookie sharpshooter Dalton Knecht and a 2031 first-round pick on the West Coast.

Normally, landing a star of Dončić’s caliber at such a young age would take every fleck of gold in the safe. In the end, Harrison went with his gut — and bet on the outcome.

“The easiest thing for me is to do nothing,” Harrison said to reporters. “Everyone would praise me for doing nothing. We really believed in it. Time will tell if I’m right.”

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Sam Hodde / Associated Press, Harry How / Getty Images)