NEWS: Donnie out | Nico Harrison (Nike) as Pres/GM | Fin as VP | Dirk as Advisor

[mavsluvr]

To be clear, my resistance is simply to the part where Cato implies that unless Cuban truly considered giving up decision-making power, then the entire Sportsology process was a sham. It's a classic strawman argument that formulates a conclusion dependent on an obviously incorrect assumption of Cuban's goals. 

I don't read it as saying anything like that. I mean, that isn't the wording he used, and  I've never heard of anyone giving up decision-making power to a search firm. I think he did suggest that he had been told that the firm's actual role might have been a little smaller than advertised. 

Assuming Cato is just repeating what he's been told, my best guess is that he got that from one or more of the candidate executives on the list who never got a callback. But if they were under the impression that they'd be calling the shots in Dallas over the owner, their lack of situational awareness is probably a contributing factor to why they didn't make the cut. After all, Sportsology's entire business model is about matching candidates to a particular culture.

My guess would be that Cato's sources were mostly in the Mavericks' front office. I don't know if the "candidate" executives were even aware they were on the list, or what they would have sourced that is contained in the story. Neither of us knows for sure, of course. 

Now maybe it's true that the Sportsology process was just a PR thing and that Cuban had his guy lined up from the start. That's fine with me because I think Nico is a great choice. It's just that to my eyes Cato's article offers no actual evidence to support that claim. But please correct me if I'm wrong!

The evidence offered was his "league sources," which we can believe or not. Another reporter (McMahon, I think) reported that the Harrison hire had been in the works for the last week or so before it happened. I get why Cuban might have wanted to announce the retention of the search firm as a PR matter, if that's what happened, and agree that having a PR purpose doesn't mean that he necessarily intended that they would never do anything.

As you point out, whatever the underlying issues were or were not, we have Nico now!