Jason Kidd signed a four-year, $40-million contract extension after the 2024 season, seemingly cementing him as the Dallas Mavericks head coach for the foreseeable future. <\/p>\n
Instead, he was abruptly fired Tuesday, prompting Charles Barkley to exclaim live on the ESPN set, \u201cOh my goodness! Jason Kidd was just fired. Wow. That\u2019s a shocker.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why? It seems that despite Kidd repeatedly asking everyone to \u201cmove forward,\u201d his presence was a constant reminder of the Mavericks\u2019 ill-fated trade<\/a> of superstar Luka Doncic <\/a>to the Lakers in February 2025. <\/p>\n The executive who made the deal \u2014 Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison \u2014 was fired in November. For a long time it wasn\u2019t clear whether Kidd was an advocate of the deal in which Dallas acquired oft-injured center Anthony Davis or a victim of a front-office blunder. <\/p>\n But Mark Cuban, the Mavericks\u2019 former majority owner who currently owns 27% of the team, indicated March 31 on a podcast <\/a>that Kidd was complicit in the deal.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there was animosity between [Harrison] and some people on Luka\u2019s team \u2014 his agent and some of the people around them,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cI don\u2019t think they got along. I think there were issues. <\/p>\n \u201cJ-Kidd had coached Anthony Davis and was close to him, and Nico was close to AD since he was like 13 years old. So I think there was some confirmation bias as well. But that doesn\u2019t justify our coach and our general manager to stand up and trade our best player.\u201d<\/p>\n Boom. Cuban turning on the coach he had long supported was telling. Kidd spent 4 \u00bd years of his 19-year Hall of Fame playing career<\/a> with Dallas, including helping the team win its only NBA title in 2011.<\/p>\n Kidd soon became a head coach, and after stints in Brooklyn and Milwaukee and two years as a Lakers assistant, Cuban hired the former point guard in 2021.<\/p>\n Under Kidd\u2019s leadership, the Mavericks ascended to the NBA Finals in 2024. But then came the Doncic deal, the finger-pointing and a throaty rebuke by the team\u2019s fans, mostly centered on Harrison.<\/p>\n Cuban linking Kidd to the trade caused the episode to bubble up again recently, much to the exasperation of the coach.<\/p>\n