Matt Riccardi joined the Mavericks back in August of 2022 for a senior front office role. After the 2023 offseason wrapped up, he was promoted to assistant general manager in August of 2023. Last week was the first time I’ve heard Riccardi’s voice.
Riccardi joined “Take Dat Wit You” earlier this week, a podcast from the Mavericks hosted by team radio broadcaster Brian Dameris and team television broadcaster Mark Followill. Despite Riccardi being a senior front office employee since 2022, this was the first time he’s ever done any sort of public interview that I’m aware of. It’s coming off the heels of the Mavericks winning the NBA Draft Lottery, enabling them to take the highly-touted Cooper Flagg. Riccardi hasn’t been the only Mavericks employee making the rounds, as Mavericks CEO Rick Welts has done multiple interviews since the Luka Doncic trade in February, and did a few more since the Mavericks won the lottery. Both Welts and Riccardi were at the lottery, with Riccardi in the actual lottery drawing room representing the Mavericks. Harrison was watching in a private room, presumably back in Dallas, with the rest of the Mavericks front office
There’s a key common denominator throughout all of these interviews: none of these men are Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison.
Harrison has done two public media availabilities since the Doncic trade — the immediate day after the trade before the Mavericks played the Cavaliers in Cleveland, and then once more after the season ended after a dispiriting loss to the Memphis Grizzlies in the play-in tournament. In between there was an incredibly awkward closed-door media session that only select, invited media members could attend with no cameras allowed.
By now it’s clear that Mavericks governor Patrick Dumont is not firing Harrison. Despite the literal protests and chants from Mavericks fans (and even at times fans from places outside of Dallas), if Dumont were going to fire Harrison, he already would have. With a month before the draft and free agency starts, it’s clear Harrison is at least sticking around for the rest of the calendar year. Other teams that had disappointing seasons have already fired their own coaches and general managers. Heck, the Denver Nuggets fired their coach and general manager on the same day before the regular season ended and advanced to the second round of the playoffs while the Mavericks have kept Harrison and missed the playoffs entirely. Other teams in need of new front office leadership are already making hires or having interviews. If the Mavericks fired Harrison tomorrow they’d already be behind in a proper search for a replacement. It’s clear now that Harrison isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Which makes Riccardi’s interview and Welts media tour even more awkward. In normal times, you’d think it’d be Harrison gladly talking to team broadcasters on a podcast about the coup of winning the lottery and first overall pick, or talking to the national media shortly after the lottery to celebrate the success of being able to draft Flagg. Instead it’s an assistant general manager and a CEO that isn’t even privy to the basketball decision making. To be fair I don’t blame the Mavericks media team one bit — no way should they have to endure more vitriol tossed their way just by involving their extremely unpopular general manager, or have to moderate their media channels with the slew of awful comments that would be sure tossed their way if they did a podcast or interview with Harrison. Those employees are frankly not paid enough to have to wade through the muck for decisions people over their heads made. Which again feeds back into how incredibly awkward this is.
It gets further awkward with the reporting coming out about Dumont’s relationship with Harrison. ESPN’s Tim MacMahon and DLLS’s Tim Cato have both reported that Dumont has now instituted some checks-and-balanced with Harrison, that he no longer gets carte blanche to make basketball moves, and even so much as suggesting to hire a veteran executive to keep him in line.
So we have a general manager that is so unpopular he has to be hidden from public sight, and his boss has to babysit him to prevent him from making further catastrophic mistakes that could do more harm the franchise. To put this bluntly: What are we doing here?
If the owner of the team no longer trusts his GM to make moves with the best interest of the franchise in mind, and the organization has to hide said GM from the public to avoid further embarrassment, then what’s the point of even having that GM at all? It would be much easier to just fire Harrison and have a fresh start with Flagg then to do all this work just to keep Harrison employed with the Mavericks. Is this fun for anyone? I’m sure Mavericks employees would love to talk about their GM without having to avoid his name like he’s Voldemort, or I’m sure the owner would love to know he doesn’t have to keep an eye on all his moves or he tanks the entire franchise in one night. It’s both baffling and bizarre. Better general managers than Harrison have been fired for significantly better results than what Harrison has provided over the last six months. This is a league that will fire the Coach of the Year 12 months later. It’s staggering that Harrison can avoid the chopping block when you look across the landscape of moves the league makes every year.
At the end of the day, none of this really matters. But Riccardi’s interview was a tipping point for me in how weird this all is. Don’t let anyone tell you what the Mavericks are going through is normal, even if Flagg represents a newfound hope for the direction of the organization. The Mavericks employ a GM they don’t want seen or heard, nor one that they trust. It’s a strange combination and no one can tell me otherwise.