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Tim MacMahon
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.”
DERECK LIVELY II, a 21-year-old center who projects as a long-term cornerstone, was listed as questionable on Jan. 20 because of a right ankle sprain after sitting out the previous two games. Under Belton’s supervision, Lively went through an intense return-to-play workout before sitting out again that night.
The plan was for Lively to play at home two nights later against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
But Bilsborough had concerns, prompting him to send Lively for a CT scan. It revealed a stress fracture in his right ankle that sidelined the center for the next 2½ months.
“Somebody should be fired for that,” a team source said then.
It was a symptom of a much larger problem, multiple team sources said.
Harrison, though, portrayed the handling of Lively’s injury as proof that his medical staff is “elite,” as he said Tuesday. Sources said that Lively’s camp was pleased with Bilsborough’s communication and collaboration during the recovery and rehab process.
“It actually goes to show the strength of our medical team, because he was cleared to play, but his signs and symptoms where our medical team knew it was something more,” Harrison said. “So that’s why they went and tested them again and saw the CT scan, which they actually avoided a potential catastrophic injury. So you know, you will take the angle of being negative, but it’s actually a positive thing, because they saw with the symptoms, even though he was cleared to play, they didn’t feel right putting him on the floor.
“And so they went back. They stopped him from playing. They went back. They retested, and thank God we saw that he had a stress fracture.”
According to more than 10 team sources, the situation led to a loud, heated confrontation between Bilsborough and Belton that began in the trainer’s room at the practice facility and continued into the weight room. Harrison did not reply to a question about the incident — or several others regarding the health and performance group — ESPN submitted to the Mavs’ media relations department this week. The Mavs declined to make Bilsborough or Belton available for comment.
“Not punches, but they were going at it,” one of many sources who viewed the surveillance footage of the incident told ESPN.
“That was coming for a long time,” another team source said.
THE FRICTION HAD been simmering for months. Harrison had created the uncomfortable dynamic by agreeing to hire Belton before Bilsborough, even though Bilsborough is in charge of the department.
Bilsborough does not respect Belton’s acumen, sources said.
“He’s a glorified cheerleader,” one team source said. “But Nico clearly wanted cheerleader energy.”
According to the National Strength Coaches Association database, Belton does not have either of the certifications from the association that are required for NBA strength coaches, per Article XXII of the collective bargaining agreement. The CBA states that an individual hired as a head strength and conditioning coach must have at least three years of experience since receiving those certifications.
An NBA spokesman said the league office was aware that Belton lacked the required certifications, but that the league office accepted his certifications from the College Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association on a temporary basis with the expectation he would receive his NSCA certifications immediately after the season. Belton’s UCLA biography noted that he “was a winner of the prestigious Stucky Award given to individuals who excelled during the practical section of the exam.”
Some of Belton’s critics describe him as more of a personal trainer than the “body engineer” that is standard for modern NBA strength coaches.
“Johann is a little bit handcuffed in his department,” a team source said. “[Belton is in] a pivotal role that trains players, but keeps the department in line to a philosophy and everyone working in the same way — [Belton is] none of those things. And then on top of it, the two of them have been beefing since day one, which led to the big blowup.
“He has shown no respect to Johann the entire year. No collaboration whatsoever. He either ranges from completely standoffish to doing the dumbest s— with a player just to prove a point to Johann. It’s terrible. And you can’t do it that way. You can’t do what he’s done and not put a player more at risk by doing that.”
Belton, a former NFL fullback, had no previous NBA experience before this season. He had spent the previous four years as the director of football performance at UCLA, one of several college stops during a coaching career that has primarily focused on the sport he played professionally.
Bilsborough, an Australian sports scientist with a doctorate, also came to the Mavs from the football world, having spent the previous five seasons as the New England Patriots‘ director of performance and rehabilitation. He also had previous NBA experience, serving as the Boston Celtics‘ director of sports science from 2017 to 2020.
One Celtics source described Bilsborough as a highly intelligent academic expert — but not a practitioner — and someone who tends to be “divisive when he disagrees with somebody.”
Bilsborough and Art Horne, the Celtics’ head athletic trainer and director of performance at the time, disagreed often. They had no previous relationship but were hired in the same offseason to be co-heads of Boston’s health and performance group.
“That was a problem,” the Celtics source said. “There was a cold war. There were Art Horne people and there were Johann people.”
The communication between the cliques in the department was infrequent and unproductive, Celtics sources said. Bilsborough left the Celtics after three seasons. Horne remains in Boston, having been promoted to director of organizational growth and team development in 2022.
Bilsborough struggled to establish rapport with Doncic and the five-time first-team All-NBA selection’s “body team.” Harrison had already alienated Doncic by running off the people he trusted and respected. Bilsborough, who already had big shoes to fill in replacing Smith, never earned Doncic’s trust or respect, according to sources.
It’s not a coincidence that Jalen Brunson‘s New York Knicks hired Smith as their vice president of sports medicine as soon as his Mavs contract expired last summer. New York also hired former Mavs athletic trainer Heather Mau. The games lost to injury for the Knicks have dropped significantly from last season, and Smith and Mau recently oversaw Brunson’s recovery from a gruesome ankle sprain.
Weeks after leaving the Mavs in free agency in 2022, Brunson discussed how much he would miss “the Caseys,” Holsopple and Mau during an appearance on the “Old Man and the Three” podcast hosted by JJ Redick. Redick mentioned that he still was in an active group chat with those then-Dallas staffers despite spending only two months with the Mavs at the end of his playing career a year earlier.
“Not a lot of people understand how much of a difference those people make in your everyday life,” Brunson said. “I never take it for granted. They’re really special. And the fact that they’re so personable and you can talk to them about anything, that makes it even harder [to leave the Mavs]. It’s not just work. They know how to be people.”
Mavs sources, as well as agents and associates of multiple players currently on the Dallas roster, are split on Bilsborough. Some described him as evidenced-based and competent; others are critical. The complaints about him are that he doesn’t establish relationships with players or staff, doesn’t travel with the team often early in the season and occasionally had “optimistic” timetables for return from injury.
“If you’re not around the team all the time, you shouldn’t be involved in decision-making,” a team source said.
Added another team source who otherwise praised Bilsborough: “That is definitely a challenge. You can’t be perceived as this guy that hovers around. You got to be able to get in and obviously that’s Casey’s magic.”
Harrison defended the Mavs’ health and performance group, pointing out that the vast majority of injuries sustained by Dallas players this season have been “unavoidable” and caused by contact.
But on multiple occasions, Mavs players have aggravated injuries or sustained related injuries immediately upon their return.
“It’s hard to say what a guy should have for a contact injury, but how fast they come back or how likely they are to reinjure it, that’s another story,” a team source said. “How do you get me back? How well am I when I got back? That’s the medical staff and the [performance] staff.”
Added another team source: “I think that is where you really see the effect of the dysfunction, but not just within the medical department, but the pressure to tread water until other guys come back so that you can prove what decisions [the front office] made up until this point were the right ones. … I think there’s a dysfunction on an organization level because of the trade itself.”
The most notable and costly example is the left adductor strain sustained by Davis during his Dallas debut on Feb. 8, when he returned from an abdominal strain that he sustained Jan. 28, days before the trade.
With Harrison under fire, Davis was motivated to make a strong first impression to the outraged Mavs fan base in the first home game after the shocking blockbuster deal. He acknowledged that he should have waited another game or two to return, but Davis said it was his decision made in consultation with his personal medical team and Bilsborough.
“They meet and communicate every day,” said Davis, who works with his own staff in the weight room instead of Belton. “Everybody is one big team.”
That description doesn’t apply to the dynamic between Bilsborough and Belton, according to multiple sources, who say their discord has been a detriment to the team.
“With all the great organizations, the performance and medical [staffs] are seamless,” a team source said. “And here they’re just completely separate and at odds. It’s pretty clear to see the effect of the divide. The division created an unfortunate environment that ultimately the players had to suffer from.”
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Luka checks out to standing ovation from Dallas crowd
Luka Doncic receives a standing ovation from Mavericks fans after he leaves the game with 45 points in his return to Dallas.
MONTHS BEFORE SMITH’S exit, Doncic and Seager had hired Real Madrid physiotherapist Javier Barrio Calvo and Slovenian national team strength coach Anze Macek — both of whom Doncic knew well — to work for him after his nagging quadriceps injury contributed to the Mavs limping into the 2023 draft lottery. It followed a trend of NBA superstars, including Davis and Mavs guard Kyrie Irving, employing their own health and performance staff to work in consultation with their team’s department.
Doncic and Seager had envisioned his staff working seamlessly with Smith, who made annual summer visits to Slovenia and often attended Doncic’s national team games around the globe. With Smith having been dismissed for the final year of his contract, Holsopple was the Mavs’ point man in the union with Doncic’s body team.
Doncic’s camp considered the first season of the arrangement a great success. He averaged a league-leading 33.9 points, 9.2 rebounds and 9.8 assists during the regular season and became the first player in NBA history to lead the league in points, rebounds, assists and steals during a postseason. He also led the league in total minutes with 3,524 combined in the regular season and playoffs.
“You don’t perform like that … if you’re a fat, drunk pig,” a friend of Doncic’s grumbled, feeling as if that’s how the Mavs portrayed the superstar in the aftermath of the trade, ending Doncic’s dream to spend his career in Dallas.
Despite the historic production, Harrison was concerned Doncic had still gained weight during the season while carrying the heavy workload. The tension thickened between the GM and the increasingly alienated face of the franchise and his camp. Bilsborough stepped into a difficult situation and didn’t endear himself to Doncic’s camp.
Sources said Cuban, who had made Doncic’s happiness his top priority since Dallas acquired the draft rights to the prodigy in 2018 and worked closely with Seager for years before that, volunteered to serve as an intermediary. But Harrison had succeeded in pushing Cuban completely out of basketball operations since Patrick Dumont took over as the team’s governor and didn’t want to cede any ground, sources said.
It didn’t help matters that Doncic was hit in his left calf while scrimmaging with teammates at SMU just before training camp opened. It was initially believed to be just a bruise, but after Doncic experienced significant soreness in the opening practice of camp, an MRI revealed a Grade 1 strain, sources said, which the Mavs did not mention in their injury release.
Doncic sat out the preseason and added more than a dozen pounds during his absence, sources said, frustrating and angering Harrison and others in the organization.
Doncic, who also used his own team of doctors instead of the Mavs’ physicians, was diagnosed with a sprained right wrist on Nov. 20. Sources said Harrison and the Mavs’ medical staff considered the diagnosis a cover-up to allow Doncic time to work on his conditioning and shed weight after a sluggish start to the season by his standards.
On Nov. 29, a day before the fifth and final game he sat out, a television in the media room at the Mavs’ practice facility was tuned into the closed-circuit feed of Doncic scrimmaging with low minutes players and staffers, launching long jumpers on almost every offensive possession. When a team employee noticed the feed, they changed the channel quickly, saying they were unsure how it became available. The feed has not been shown in the media room since.
Barrio Calvo and Bilsborough communicated regularly, but they frequently disagreed, sources said. Meetings that included Harrison, Bilsborough, Seager, Barrio Calvo and Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, were often tense and unproductive. Doncic did not work with Belton at all.
The tension between the sides soared after Doncic sustained another left calf strain — his fourth in a 28-month span — on Christmas Day. Doncic’s camp believed he had returned too quickly from a left heel bruise he had sustained during his 45-point triple-double in a Dec. 15 win over the Golden State Warriors and had been playing on his toes to avoid discomfort in his heel. Harrison blamed poor conditioning.
The sides also drastically disagreed on the timetable for Doncic’s return after receiving the MRI results. Bilsborough believed Doncic could be back in two or three weeks, sources said, while Doncic’s team adamantly stated that he needed to sit out six weeks. They got their way, and a target return date was set for the Feb. 8 home game against the Houston Rockets.
“That deepened the divide,” a source said.
Doncic didn’t put any weight on his left leg for two weeks, using crutches and a scooter to get around. The MRI results four weeks later were encouraging but the plan remained in place.
Another major disagreement emerged between the sides when Doncic refused Harrison’s request to join the team on a five-game trip leading up to his target return date.
Harrison griped that Doncic was holding the team hostage, sources said.
Doncic’s camp argued that he was better off having around-the-clock access to the Mavs’ practice facility than traveling with the team. It pointed out that Doncic was doing two-a-day, multihour basketball workouts, which wouldn’t be possible with court time difficult to book on the road. He also could utilize the weight room and the high-tech medical equipment at his convenience, which isn’t the case in other team’s arenas and hotels.
Harrison countered, insisting that Doncic needed to scrimmage. Doncic’s camp, in response, said he’d be happy to practice with the G League Texas Legends in Frisco, a Dallas suburb.
The next time Doncic’s camp heard from Harrison, it was to share the news that the trade he’d been secretly negotiating for weeks with the Lakers was finalized.
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