While they may have reached the NBA Finals last season, the Mavs lost their franchise superstar somewhere along the way—and it’s all their own fault.

The Dallas Mavericks failed Luka Doncic and they failed themselves. This was true even before team president Nico Harrison made a widely (and justifiably) panned trade with the Los Angeles Lakers. As soon as Harrison began discussing a deal, he was acknowledging his own failure, even if he doesn’t see it that way.

Running an NBA team is a lot harder than it appears from the outside. But ultimately, success is often determined by two factors: acquiring a superstar, and managing him.

The Mavs had a superstar. They failed to manage him. Harrison can gush about new acquisition Anthony Davis, but Davis is almost 32 years old with a history of injuries. You don’t trade 25-year-old Doncic for Davis.

When Harrison traded Doncic, he was really saying that Doncic would never listen to the Mavs. Not about his conditioning. Not about defense. The Mavericks made the NBA Finals last year, but somewhere along the way, they lost Doncic.

That is entirely on them.

Was Doncic overweight too often? Yup. Did he often act like his entire job was to play offense and complain about calls? Sure. Should he be a better defensive player by now? Absolutely.

But when you have a superstar, you get the whole superstar. You don’t just ride the creative genius and then whine about the stuff you don’t like. 

Harrison told ESPN, “I believe that defense wins championships.” This is the same man who decided Doncic’s running mate should be Kyrie Irving, who has gotten exactly one All-Defensive team vote in his entire career. Not one selection to the team—one vote. What kind of message did that send Doncic about the importance of defense to the franchise?

The hard part about managing stars is that you need them more than they need you—and they know it. If a star doesn’t like the coach, the coach usually gets fired. If a star is unhappy with his organization, he can force a trade. That usually leaves the team without a superstar—and leads, eventually, to everybody getting fired.

So yes: It’s hard. But great NBA franchises usually figure it out. They have hard conversations. They tell the star that he might not like what he is hearing, but they want what is best for him—and they get him to believe it.

There are a number of ways they do this. They establish trust early. They show they care not just about the player off the court, but the player’s family and closest friends. They get the player’s agent, trainer and other confidants on their side. They hire assistant coaches who can manage the tension between the head coach and the star. They build a roster of players who fit with the star on the court and also have the priorities and work ethic that they want the player to have. There is a reason the Miami Heat kept Udonis Haslem around for so long. Sometimes the last guy on your roster has an outsized effect on the first.

There was a time when NBA teams lost superstars because they pushed them too hard. These days, franchises are more likely to lose stars because they let them get away with too much for too long— and when they finally try to get tough, the player just laughs. You could argue that the Heat lost LeBron James because they prioritized their culture over his happiness, but remember: Cleveland catered to him twice and lost him twice.

Even the best organizations have botched this on occasion. The Heat should have dealt Jimmy Butler last summer; instead, Pat Riley called him out publicly, and now the situation is a mess. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich famously directed all Kawhi Leonard injury questions to Leonard and “his group,” and Leonard forced his way out.

But Popovich also told Tony Parker, in the wake of a championship, that the team would try to sign fellow point guard Jason Kidd. Parker hated it, and Kidd did not go to San Antonio, but the Spurs managed the situation as well as they could, Parker stuck around for 15 more seasons.

Managing a star is difficult in part because it is constant. NBA teams play 82 games per season, but superstars are superstars every day of the year. They might want you to hire their friends, sign their agent’s clients or let them fly separately from the team for social reasons. They might not want to play in back-to-back games, compete defensively in practice or lay off the donuts.

The Mavericks had seven seasons to get Doncic to be the best version of himself. Harrison had four. Harrison arrived while the best coach in franchise history, Rick Carlisle, departed for Indiana. The Mavs brought Kidd in to replace Carlisle. In late 2023, longtime owner Mark Cuban, as hands-on as any in the league, sold his majority stake in the team. Harrison had more power and a single directive: Help Luka hang banners.

The Mavs should never have gotten to this point. Even with his conditioning issues and defensive indifference, Doncic has been first-team All-NBA for each of the last five seasons. I believe Doncic is difficult. I don’t believe he was terminally unreachable. 

The Mavs decided the two most important members of the team, other than Doncic, would be Kidd and Irving. Irving is a great player, and blaming him is easy sport, but this isn’t about blame. If you want Doncic to go from offensive engine to two-way star, you don’t trade for Irving.

Kidd is one of the great operators in league history; if this trade fails, as it seems certain to do, he will inevitably position himself as a victim of it. Whether that is right or wrong is beside the point. The NBA, as Cuban might say, is a shark tank. The Mavericks had their chance with Doncic, and they blew it.