Tomorrow, the Dallas Mavericks will be tipping off a play-in game against the Sacramento Kings. Win, and their hopes of making the postseason stay alive. Lose, and their season ends. Obviously, today was the perfect day for the front office to orchestrate a strange, semi-secretive sit-down with selected members of the local media, the purpose of which seems to have been getting everyone really agitated about the Luka Doncic trade again.
The meeting was organized by Mavs general manager Nico Harrison and CEO Rick Welts. According to DLLS Sports reporter Tim Cato, there were about 15 people present at the meeting, including several Mavericks staffers. The reporters who attended the meeting had to agree not to record any audio, and were told that no video cameras would be allowed into the room. Surely these restrictions were put in place because Harrison and Welts had something new to say to the media, perhaps even a piece of information so explosive that it could not be appropriately revealed without strict messaging controls in place. Surely these two bozos did not drag a dozen or so reporters down to the team facility this morning so that they could sit there and say "Defense wins championships" over and over again.
"The messaging from Nico Harrison was 'Defense wins championships.' It was the same messaging," said Cato on his podcast, after the meeting. He then described multiple instances in which Harrison answered a question about the Doncic trade by saying, "Defense wins championships."
Before this meeting, nobody on Earth was under the impression that Nico Harrison was harboring doubts about defense's ability to win championships, because that is all he has been offering as an explanation for trading Doncic since the moment the move was announced. His affinity for defense, and his belief that it wins championships, has been so thoroughly discussed and analyzed that you do not even need to follow NBA basketball that closely to be aware of it. We all know how this guy feels about defense!
So what was the point of this meeting? At this point we can only assume that Harrison and his fellow execs have some sort of humiliation fetish, and have collectively lost the ability to stop acting on it. Why else would Harrison travel all the way to Los Angeles and listen to Lakers fans chant, "Thank you, Nico!" during Doncic's first game against the Mavericks as a Laker? Why else would the organization go out of its way to question Doncic's conditioning and mentality in the immediate aftermath of the trade, and then welcome him as a returning hero a few weeks later? Why else would they choose the day before the most important game of the season to once again show their asses to the whole world?
If the Mavs lose Wednesday night, there's a chance that Harrison will be meeting with the press again before the end of the week for a customary end-of-season press conference. This guy is a sick puppy.
