Dallas – The General Manager of Mavericks, Nico Harrison, says he miscalculated the depth of love that his club fans had for Luka Doncic before the exchange that he sent to the young superstar to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis.
Despite the persistent fans chairs to be fired in the 2 and a half months from the agreement, Harrison still believes that it was the right movement to build a championship contender in Dallas.
“I knew that Luka was important for the Fan Base,” Harrison said on Monday during his seasonal season conference, six days after a session with a smaller group of reporters that the club called to try to pass the Doncic trade. “I didn’t know to what level.”
As he said before, Harrison was waiting for a great setback from the exchange, but thought he would have decreased before if Davis could have played with Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson, PJ Washington and Dirck Lively II for most of the rest of the season.
On the other hand, those five have not yet played together, and Davis’s star combo and Irving shared less than three quarters together before Davis injured a groin in his debut in Dallas. Irving broke the LCA on his left knee while Davis was out.
“We believe it is a championship caliber team and we would have been winning at a high level, and that would have calmed part of the outrage,” Harrison said as part of the same response on the love of fans by Doncic. “And so, unfortunately, we couldn’t do that, so he continued and followed.”
The Mavericks almost did not have enough players to meet the minimum requirement of the NBA for several games, while Davis was marginalized. Once he returned, the MAVs stabilized and qualified for the last place in the west conference game tournament at number 10.
Dallas won in Sacramento for an opportunity in the eighth seed in the playoffs before losing in Memphis.
Harrison said he believes that the MAVs will get a good player in the first round of the draft, where they are scheduled to choose the 11th. Nor did he rule out changes in free agency.
But when he asked what Dallas should do to become a contender again, Harrison said: “We really need to be healthy. I think the team we are bringing back is a championship caliber. We hope that Kyrie returns with us next year when they cure him of his injury. And we believe we will compete for a championship.”
After Harrison repeatedly said last week that “the defense wins championships” while defending the trade, Espn asked Donci with his reaction to the session, saying that GM’s comments were “sad” and that he wanted to move on.
Harrison, who said last week that he had not yet spoken with the five -time NBA player who directed the Mavericks to the NBA finals last season, asked about that exchange and said: “I feel the same as him. I have never really talked about Luka, and I am ready to move forward with this team we have.”
