Dallas Cowboys fans have not been pleased with the front office of their franchise. In the minds of many, the frugality of the team’s top decision makers has led to too many missed opportunities over the years. It’s a trend that appears to be continuing into 2025, and a resentment that’s been unrivaled in the local DFW fanbase.

That is, until the Dallas Mavericks told Jerry Jones to hold their beer.

The Mavericks recently made news for all the wrong reasons this week. They took a generational talent, just entering his prime, and flipped him for a player who’s great, but, by most accounts, past his prime. Other side dishes were included in this smorgasbord of lopsidedness but for the most part it was a trade of Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis.

The Mavericks GM, Nico Harrison, defended the trade citing things like culture, fit, defense and conditioning as reasons why the trade was made. These issues may have very well existed, but to most fans, they hardly justified trading away a perennial MVP candidate. It was a move that made Jones and the Cowboys look good. Considering what’s happened for them over the past two seasons, that’s saying something.

Jones has been on a mission of austerity as of late. While he’s re-signed his must-have superstars, he’s been essentially asset stripping his roster by parting ways with costly second and third-tier players, rounding out the roster, coaching staff, and support personnel the cheapest way possible.

A reason why he would do such a thing is a fatal flaw within the structure of the team. Jones isn’t just the general manager and chief decision maker but he’s also the owner. What he doesn’t spend on players, coaches, and support personnel, he gets to keep in some ways. That’s not something any other GM in the NFL can say.

Other GMs are given a budget and are fairly determined to spend to the limits of that budget in the name of winning. Unlike Jones, they can be fired if they fall short of expectations therefore, they have to make every season count. The demand to win now is significant, so understandably the life expectancy of a GM is fairly low. Based on these same motivating forces, the Cowboys have no comparable urgency to win and every financial reason to save.

Up until this week, Harrison was regarded as one of the best GMs in the NBA. The former Nike executive has stacked the Dallas roster and made the 2024-2025 Mavericks one of the deepest and most talented teams in the league. He’s gone to the Conference Finals twice and the Finals once in a short time and done so with wildly different rosters. Even with Harrison’s success he feels the pressure to win now and has wasted no time making moves to achieve that goal.

Unlike Jones, Harrison doesn’t have the benefit of eternal job security on his side and that has presumably led to a highly controversial roster move. When asked about how the Doncic trade affects the Mavericks in the long-term Harrison showed why even a traditional GM structure has flaws.

“[Anthony Davis] fits right along with our timeframe to win now. And win in the future. In the future to me is three or four years from now,” Harrison clarified to reporters. “The future, 10 years from now, I don’t know. I think they’ll probably bury me and J [Kidd] by then. Or we bury ourselves.”

Harrison isn’t a fan of the Mavericks, but rather he’s an employee. He’s not married to the team like the fanbase is. There’s a good chance he’ll be gone in three or four years, making Doncic’s long-term value unimportant to him. Fans are critical of the move because they’ll still be Mavericks fans for the next 10 years. After Harrison is gone and Davis is retired, they’ll still be watching Doncic dominate the NBA and it will probably be extremely painful. That day could realistically be just five years away.

This kind of thing isn’t an issue for Jones and the Cowboys. Jones loves his Cowboys franchise and if anything, he cares too much about the long-term good of the team and not enough about the urgency of the here and now. He probably would have cashed on the Doncic brand in perpetuity. He probably wouldn’t have surrounded him the same depth of talent as Harrison has done, but he would have kept him.

If fans had to pick which is GM setup is better, most would probably point to the traditional type of GM like the Mavericks have. But as Harrison just showed everyone, even that has its problems because most GMs aren’t concerned about life after they’re gone. For universal Dallas fans, it’s the worst of both worlds this year. Guess it’s a good time to be a Stars fan.

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