As he addressed the state of the Mavericks Tuesday afternoon, general manager Nico Harrison mapped out a clear itinerary for burying the disappointing 2022-23 season and driving forward to better times ahead.
The GM will be going into his third season as head of the basketball organization, and he doesn’t intend on anything close to a repeat of Year Two.
“To fans that are frustrated, they should be frustrated,” Harrison said. “I’m frustrated. This year is not acceptable and so I feel this. Nobody can be harder on myself than I am. I take my job serious and wins and losses and not reaching our goals – so I feel for them.
“The only confidence I can give is that we’re going to evaluate everything and we’re not going to be in this position again.”
The road back starts with one simple truth.
“In this league, you got to have talent,” Harrison said. “At the end of the day, if you don’t have talent, you can only go so far.”
With that battle cry, Harrison, Governor Mark Cuban and coach Jason Kidd will go about the business of systematically moving forward – starting with the pursuit of Kyrie Irving.
For the Mavericks, having talent starts with keeping the Irving-Luka Dončić pairing intact.
Irving, the free-agent-to-be, had his exit interview with the management team on Monday. The Mavericks, Harrison said, got the vibe they were hoping for.
“We had a great conversation,” he said. “I think the things he said along the way about how he feels here, how he feels appreciated, how he feels accepted and (is) allowed to be himself – those are things he said kind of consistently and that’s what gives me the optimism that he wants to be here.
“Kyrie’s definitely somebody we want here and we’re excited about the potential of him being here.”
Free agency begins June 30. Until then, the Mavericks have the draft lottery and lots of self-evaluation to get through.
But the Luka-Kyrie partnership is not something that is keeping Harrison up at nights.
“Luka and Kai work together,” he said. “When you have that talented two players, I think they work together. I really think it’s the players around them. I think the players around them kind of knowing their role with those two guys out on the floor at the same time, I think that’s the thing we need to work on.”
Asked where the focus has to be when it comes to putting better-fitting pieces around Dončić and Irving, Harrison said:
“Defense and rebounding for sure. I think that’s important. But, basketball IQ – when you have two guys at that level, you got to have players that can think the game and not just play it because those guys are high IQ players.”
Harrison said he feels like Dončić has the right mindset moving forward. He said the onus is on him and his staff to make life simpler for the superstar who will be entering his sixth season.
“If you win, then I’m assuming he’s going to be happy,” he said of Luka. “He says he wants to be here, he’s under contract.
“Our job really, to keep Luka happy, is surrounding him (with) the right players to help him win. I think for us going into off season, the two biggest things that we need to work on is defense, period, and then rebounding. So that’s going to be addressed.”
Harrison called the season “disappointing” and said it never reached a point where he thought it was headed in a great direction.
“We weren’t very good early defensively,” he said. “And sometime around December, you know, it was clear that we weren’t a very good defensive team. But we had a lot of the same players from last year.”
That’s what precipitated the trading of Dorian Finney-Smith and Spencer Dinwiddie for Irving.
Once that deal happened, the Mavericks had hope, but it never materialized into enough victories to make a serious playoff push. Losing a plethora of close games made matters more frustrating.
“I think we were close,” Harrison said. “But not close enough. Obviously, (because) we’re sitting here now.”
But with the disappointment comes a chance to grow, he said. And that will come with an aggressive, and hopefully fruitful, offseason.
Twitter: @ESefko
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