Nico Harrison must be blamed for Mavericks' never-ending crisis from last season

The 2024-25 season for the Dallas Mavericks always is, and will always be remembered as the season that Nico Harrison traded Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis less than an hour before midnight on February 1.

Chatter about this shocking move has dominated sports news for months, and ever since the trade went down, the Mavericks haven't been able to escape the cloud hanging over their heads. Dallas plummeted in the standings and ended up being a play-in team just one year after making the NBA Finals, and their performance on the floor should be noted as disappointing, to say the absolute least.

Even before the Doncic trade, seemingly nothing was going right for the Mavericks outside of the stretch in which they won 14 of 17 games, and that can largely be blamed on the nonstop injuries (and even a wild locker room illness) that came their way. The Mavs were hit hard by injuries before the season even started, as both Dante Exum and Luka Doncic suffered injuries in training camp that ultimately caused setbacks ahead of the regular season.

Nico Harrison set Mavericks up for disaster by ignoring key hole

Nearly every player on the Mavs suffered some sort of serious injury this season, and while some of these injuries were just unlucky and unpredictable, such as Kyrie Irving's ACL tear, Dallas' injury problem can partially fall onto Harrison's shoulders. He decided to play with fire when it came to the team's medical department, and he got burned.

In a recent article by ESPN's Tim MacMahon, he details behind-the-scenes events that ultimately led to Harrison trading Doncic to the Lakers, and one major problem all season long was the functionality of Dallas' medical team. They weren't in sync with each other, and Harrison didn't even hire a manual therapist for the entire season.

After the Mavs lost the 2024 NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics, Harrison decided to get rid of the team's manual therapist, Casey Spangler, a few days later. Spangler was someone who Doncic was close to and appreciated, and this firing only added to the long list of Harrison firing staff members that Doncic trusted and admired.

Rather than doing his due diligence and hiring another manual therapist, Harrison did nothing. He didn't hire anyone to replace Spangler, and things couldn't have gone worse for the Mavs in the injury department.

Players like Jaden Hardy and P.J. Washington dealt with recurring and nagging ankle injuries that would reappear at the worst times. Dallas' injury return timelines were questionable all season long, and having a manual therapist who could have worked on the players' muscles and joints would have helped these players recover more effectively while simultaneously reducing their chance of getting reinjured.

Their entire recovery and rehab process was dysfunctional, and this stood true for multiple players. Doncic's body team and Dallas' medical team were not aligned when it came to his recovery from his calf strain, as the Mavericks thought that he should have returned much sooner than Doncic's team.

Dallas' medical team also made the near-catastrophic mistake of misdiagnosing Dereck Lively II's right ankle injury. The medical team initially thought it was a sprained ankle, but after putting Lively II through a workout ahead of his anticipated return, they decided to send him in to get a CT scan. It turned out he had a stress fracture in his ankle, and he had gone through his workout with that injury present.

This mishap led to a heated altercation between two staff members, and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to everything that went wrong behind closed doors this season.

On top of everything mentioned, Dallas' medical team also often gave "optimistic" return-from-injury timetables, and several times, players returned from injuries too soon, causing them to get reinjured and miss more time. Davis' eager return from injury that led to him getting hurt three quarters into his Mavs debut comes to mind first, and Harrison must find a way to fix the disaster that happened within the medical team this season.

One move that must be made is Harrison hiring a manual therapist, and he has to get things running orderly again within the medical team to give Dallas the best shot at contending once again.