All right, we got about thirty minutes left to go in the show. We're going to spend it all talking about the MAVs and the Lucas situation. A big bombshell article dropped today from Tim McMahon on ESPN. You had a Tim Cato article, You've had Mark Stein, and then you had another press conference. This time it was just Nico talking to the media here and he answered the question for questions for about twenty five minutes. A couple of those questions not that good. Some of those questions
pretty good. I had wished it would gone on longer, but it just would. He would have been a pinata out there just getting killed if it had gone longer.
Yeah, and I think, you know, from a Nico perspective, the fact that no one asked him anything about those articles and he didn't have to go on record about it was a win for him.
I don't understand that. I don't understand, and again, not being critical, I guess I am, but I'm not. Look. I wasn't there but for the people that went there specifically to ask questions. Tim McMahon basically wrote today that you know that there was a key moment that fractured
the relationship between Luca and his team and Dirk. As he was pointing it out when Casey Smith was fired and he was fired, he was so respected and Tim McMahon makes it look like Casey Smith was fired because Nico was threatened by him, and he fired him while he was over Zoom, while he was visiting his mother who was passing away, and he lost Dirk at that moment, and probably lost Luca at that moment, and things were massively fractured, and that did none of the There was
no questions about that that came up at this thing.
He uh, you know, if I'm him at this point, I'm moving on. I'm not talking about that. I mean, I like, there's not going to be another chance for him to be in front of the media except maybe on Draft Day. And you right, and so when draft day gets here, we're going to be in late June, so you know, it's not going to be a story anymore. And so again, if I'm looking at it from his perspective, he's got to be like, great, nobody asked me about this.
Here's how I feel about all this. I feel that with Mark Cuban, it felt like the MAVs were a small family owned business.
I know they're not.
They weren't in the You know, obviously he had his own issues, but I loved it. I preferred it, and I miss it. But it felt like a family owned business. A super passionate MAVs fan is running it. He's one of us. He just happens to be a billionaire. Felt like a family owned business. This field's colder and more corporate. And there was a moment in this press conference where Nico said, everything we do is without emotion, and it goes through the lens of process. Do you have that audio?
All right, let's take a listen.
Oop's wrong thing.
I love a good drum, fill said locked on MAVs. You said that Patrick Jamontt initially laughed at you when you brought him the Luca trade. What did you say to convince him to approve it?
It wasn't really uh, it wasn't really a laugh. It was more of a chuckle, But really it was just I'd set it out of the blue. And then, as we said, already talking more, I gave him reasoning behind it. And you know, we're a very process oriented organization and everything we do is without emotion and goes through the lens of process. And so once we had those substantive discussions, then he saw the vision.
All right, if you're going to operate the organization with that emotion, it really just comes down to whether you win or lose. It's a corporate, cold blooded mindset. It's like everything is a spreadsheet. But when it's emotion, there's some emotions are really valuable in these situations, even from a business and marketing standpoint, like like loyalty, things like that, like passion, And if you're just gonna I mean, that's
the problem. Like if you're a knee co and you're like, man, I just want to win a championship in the next two years. I don't care about the history of this organization. I don't care about the future of this organization. I'm going to be judging if I win a championship in the next two years, then maybe this trade makes sense
to go for it like this. But if you care about the history of the organist, and you care about the future of the organization, and you care about the emotions of fans, you don't ever do this.
Yeah, I would say like the things that he says, and sometimes you can say things in a way that you don't intend them. Like earlier we played the clip of him saying it was awesome when he was getting you know, you know, like sometimes you're not articulating things the way that you want. He may have been trying to say, we don't make emotional decisions, which is different than we don't factor in emotion, but regardless, that's how
it came off. And the way that he's explaining himself to me very much reminds me of the way CEOs explain things when they run corporations.
And usually if you look at.
The lifespan of a CEO in a major corporation, it's usually these periods of time and then they go on to the next corporation. And so that's what's being communicated right now, and how it's being received very much feels like that he's doing he's speaking in CEO corporate tone terms, and that's definitely the way that it's being perceived.
I want to get this correct because I don't want to misinterpret what he says.
But Bobby Carella, who's now at d LLS, used to work for the Mass forever for a long time. His mom worked for the MAVs since the eighties. He very much cares about the Mavericks.
A very good tweet this morning, and it was basically the point of this is the guy who has said multiple times he's here for three years, but nothing really more than that, which maybe that's Nico just saying that's how long my contract is. That was that was another point this is I haven't read his sweet now, so I don't screw it up here. He has explicitly said he plans to finish out his contract and reportedly has no interest in continuing beyond.
Then yeah, Kato wrote that, right, Okay, so I didn't know if Kato wrote that that that I believe that was in the DLLs article, that he has no intention of being, you know, extending his contract.
That's an amazing thing.
Again, I would have loved if Cato could have been there to ask him that.
On the record. And again, you don't want the steward of your whole spaceship being a guy who's out in three years because he doesn't care what happens to it after that. Presumabla I'm putting you know, but I'm just saying, you want, you want checks and balances. There should have been one other person they could have talked to with experience before they pulled the trigger on that trade.
Well, I agree with you, Ben, But the problem with that is that person generally is the owner of the franchise. Yeah, it is the owner of the franchise's job to because again, like Nico can say he wants to do anything he wants, but if the owner doesn't let him, that's the owner doesn't let him. Ask Donnie Nelson what it was like working with Mark Cuban. Sure, you know, you can't just
go do whatever you want. And so the whole point is that Patrick Dumont had the ability to say no, and he chose to believe in Nico, and since then has said several times and Nico we trust. And unless that is changed, which again that's the point of Team tim Cato's article. Nobody has really seen that publicly, No one knows, right, all we know is that he has said and Niko, we trust. And so you would believe that, especially based on the way it was presented today.
It's the inexperience of the owner and it's a short term vision of the GM. But all the all Patrick Dumont had to do is called Dirk. Yeah, all he had to do is say, hey, you know what, you're the most important maverick of all time. What do you think about this?
Right? And I'm sure it's Dirk. Dirk told his sister on that podcast and it has translated in German that he wouldn't have done that.
Yeah, all right, we're not finished yet. In just over three minutes, we'll be back to wrap up this conversation and wrap up the show. Don't go anywhere