DALLAS MAVERICKS’ OFFICIALS and select staffers, past and present, packed the team’s plane along with members of Dirk Nowitzki’s inner circle. The flight was bound for Springfield, Massachusetts, in August 2023, to celebrate the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction of the most legendary figure in franchise history.
Mavs general manager Nico Harrison made the trip. He wasn’t especially close to Nowitzki, but their relationship dated more than two decades to when Harrison began his career at Nike as an NBA regional field representative based in Dallas.
Casey Smith, Dallas’ director of health and performance, was also part of the team’s traveling party for the weekend. Nowitzki often credited Smith, who arrived in Dallas as the Mavs’ head athletic trainer in 2004 and was promoted to the executive ranks 15 years later, for helping him extend his career to 21 seasons. Nowitzki trusted Smith implicitly, considering him one of his best friends.
Others who joined them for the Hall of Fame festivities, which featured a pair of extravagant private parties organized by Nowitzki’s longtime special projects manager Lara Beth Seager in addition to the Hall of Fame functions, don’t recall anything seeming amiss that weekend in Springfield, when Harrison and Smith were each accompanied by their wives.
What happened next began a series of behind-the-scenes decisions that have had massive ramifications for the Mavs during this shocking, drastically disappointing, injury-riddled season in Dallas. Interviews with more than a dozen team and league insiders reveal that while the Luka Doncic era officially ended on Feb. 2, it truly began to disintegrate, along with the franchise’s culture, 18 months earlier, the summer before the generational talent led the Mavs to the NBA Finals.
A few days after returning to Dallas’ Love Field from the Hall of Fame event, when the franchise that had endured a frustrating, losing season was on a high from honoring Nowitzki, Harrison informed Smith that they needed to meet. Smith replied that it wasn’t possible to meet in person; he had gone to his hometown in Ohio to be at the side of his gravely ill mother in the final weeks of her life. Harrison set up a video conference meeting instead.
Smith was then informed that his services in Dallas were no longer needed, ending a nearly two-decade tenure with the franchise. The reason for the dismissal centered on Smith being “too negative,” according to sources briefed on the discussion who interpreted the vague reasoning to mean Smith wasn’t enough of a yes-man.
“He was 100 percent threatened by him,” a team source told ESPN, referring to Harrison’s concern that Smith’s voice carried too much weight with the franchise. “He’s going to show that I’m in charge and nobody else can question that.”
It was a stunning first step in Harrison’s overhaul of the team’s health and performance group over the past two offseasons. Smith’s unceremonious departure was followed by the dismissals of athletic performance director Jeremy Holsopple and manual therapist Casey Spangler in June, only days removed from Dallas’ appearance in the NBA Finals.
“You bringing up Casey [Smith] is like almost, it’s kind of a joke,” Harrison said Tuesday during an availability with selected Dallas-based reporters. “Like last year, Casey wasn’t around, and we made it to the Finals. No one brought up Casey last year. So, to bring him up this year doesn’t really make sense. He’s been away for two years. So it’s — I’m not even going to comment on that.”
Sources told ESPN that the frigid dynamic between Doncic’s camp — led by Seager, who became Doncic’s business manager after being introduced to him by Nowitzki — and Harrison and his new staff factored into the GM’s stunning decision to trade Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis in February.
Smith, Holsopple and Spangler were all longtime Mavs employees who had helped Doncic, a Slovenian who spent his adolescence in Spain, make the major cultural transition after coming to Dallas as a teenager. They had become confidantes for the superstar, but sources said Harrison saw them as “enablers” of Doncic, despite them being immensely respected by their peers throughout the league. Holsopple was the NBA’s Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year in 2021, and Smith’s tenure as Team USA’s head athletic trainer included the 2008 and 2012 Olympic gold medal runs.
“We feel that the guys that replaced them have done an amazing job,” Harrison said. “And again, you’re coming at me from a negative standpoint, and I look at it from a positive standpoint. The guys that we brought in are better.”
Dysfunction between Harrison’s new hires — director of player health and performance Johann Bilsborough and athletic performance director Keith Belton — has been problematic as the Mavs’ medical misfortune mounted throughout the season, sources said. The Mavs have not employed a full-time manual therapist this season. For a stretch late in the season, the Mavs sweated out fielding an active roster with the league-minimum eight available players as Dallas dipped below .500 before finishing 39-43 to claim the Western Conference’s last play-in bid.
Harrison’s decision to fire Smith, and the way he did it, also drove Nowitzki away from the franchise that he proudly played for his entire career. Sources said Nowitzki, who describes himself as a “Mavs fan” now, opted to no longer be involved in the inner workings of the franchise’s basketball operations after Smith’s forced exit. Nowitzki had served as a senior adviser to Mark Cuban, frequently attending practices and providing input when he was in Dallas.
Sources told ESPN that Smith’s ouster also prompted the departure of Mavs vice president of basketball communications Scott Tomlin, another two-decade employee of the franchise who was close with Smith, Nowitzki and Doncic, among others. Tomlin accepted an offer to become the executive director of the DN Companies and The Dirk Nowitzki Foundation.
“My obligation is to the Dallas Mavericks,” Harrison said Tuesday. “It’s what’s in the best interest of the Dallas Mavericks, and that’s the most important thing. Again, some of those decisions are going to be unpopular, maybe to Dirk and maybe to the fans, but my obligation is to the Dallas Mavericks.”
Nowitzki and Tomlin have attended two NBA games since the beginning of February: Doncic’s Lakers debut in Los Angeles on Feb. 10 and his return to Dallas on April 9.
“Over the past year, you could already see the team heading in a different direction,” Nowitzki, who declined an interview request from ESPN, said in German during a recent appearance on his foundation’s Campus 41 podcast. “Now we’re seeing the result of that.”
