How the Mavs Blew It With Jalen Brunson — From Someone Who Was There
I was in the Mavericks’ front office during Brunson’s Dallas years. Here’s how the Mavs gifted the Knicks one of their franchise’s greatest players ever.
In an alternate timeline, Jalen Brunson is still a Dallas Maverick.
“I really did want to stay in Dallas,” he would later say.
Instead, Brunson is headed to the NBA Finals with the New York Knicks.
From 2019 to 2022, I worked in the Mavs’ front office, providing a unique vantage point on the blunders that cost Dallas a future All-NBA point guard — how the franchise, then led by majority owner Mark Cuban1 and general manager Nico Harrison, fumbled Brunson away.
How exactly did we get to the point where the infamous Luka Dončić trade is in contention to be only the Mavs’ second-most disastrous decision of the past four years?
This is my version of that story — the story of how Jalen Brunson put himself in the position to become one of the greatest Knicks ever while making the Mavs’ blunders more and more painful.
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