Nico Harrison’s Old Quote About Jason Kidd Looks Even Worse Now After the Mavericks Coach’s Stunning Exit
Jason Kidd is out as head coach of the Dallas Mavericks. The team announced the mutual parting on Tuesday evening, ending one of the most turbulent five-year coaching stints in recent NBA memory. The timing made one specific old quote from former Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison look ridiculous in real time.
Harrison, who was fired in November, once gushed about Jason Kidd as the foundation of the entire Mavericks operation. The exact line that resurfaced this week was the one where Harrison called Kidd the kind of coach you build a franchise around for the long term. Harrison talked openly about wanting Kidd in Dallas for a decade. He was the one who pushed for the multi-year contract extension that Kidd just walked away from.
The contract still has four years and roughly 40 million dollars left on it. Now those years and dollars are being eaten by a franchise that has spent the last 15 months destroying its own credibility. The Mavericks paid Harrison to leave, paid Kidd to leave, and have a new president of basketball operations in Masai Ujiri who is trying to clean up a mess he had nothing to do with creating.
Let us recap how Dallas got here. In February of 2025, Harrison stunned the league by trading Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. The return was Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and draft capital that has not aged well. Davis got hurt almost immediately, played a handful of games, and was eventually shipped to Washington in another package the Mavericks lost on paper.
The Doncic trade alone should have been enough to torch every job in the building. Harrison got fired nine months later. Kidd, who reportedly supported the trade behind the scenes and saw it as a chance to take over more front office power, kept his head down and tried to coach a roster he no longer recognized. The Mavericks went 26-56 and finished 12th in the Western Conference. They missed the playoffs. They became a punchline. They drafted Cooper Flagg with the No. 1 overall pick.
Flagg won Rookie of the Year. The Mavericks’ lone bright spot of the entire season was a 19-year-old phenom playing every minute on a roster that had no veterans to support him. Kidd’s role in developing Flagg got mixed reviews. The team played hard for him at times, but the offensive system was constantly under question, and the locker room dynamic never recovered from the Doncic chaos.
The breaking point came after Harrison’s firing. Kidd reportedly told ownership he wanted to be promoted to president of basketball operations. New majority owner Patrick Dumont turned him down. Then Ujiri got hired into the role Kidd wanted, and the writing was on the wall.
That is when Harrison’s old quote becomes even more brutal. The architect who sold the franchise on Kidd as a decade-long answer was so wrong about everything that the Mavericks had to fire the GM and then pay the coach to leave just to start over. The praise Harrison heaped on Kidd reads like a press release written by someone who has never watched basketball.
Kidd is now linked to the Orlando Magic, who fired their own head coach earlier this spring and are trying to find a voice that can get Paolo Banchero to take the next step. It would be a soft landing for Kidd, who would inherit a young roster with real talent and a front office that knows what it is doing. The Magic do not have Dallas’s chaos. They have an All-Star forward, a top-five defense, and a need for a name-brand coach who can manage star egos.
Dallas, meanwhile, gets to start over again. The franchise has gone from 2024 NBA Finals to coaching search in 24 months. Ujiri now has to figure out how to build around Flagg without repeating the mistakes of his predecessor. The first job is finding a coach. The harder job is convincing anyone in the league that the Mavericks are still a serious organization. Harrison’s quote about Kidd is the kind of evidence that says they have not been one in a long time.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
