Masai Ujiri sat on the dais beside Dallas Mavericks governor Patrick Dumont on Tuesday and immediately set the tone for what he intends to be a reset of one of the NBA's most fractured franchises. The 2019 Toronto Raptors championship architect was introduced as the Mavericks' new president of basketball operations and alternate governor on May 5, the culmination of a five-month courtship that began with a December phone call and a five-hour lunch.
"This is a really exciting day for the Dallas Mavericks organization," Dumont opened. "Masai is here. This is a big day for the Dallas Mavericks. He's a leader with experience, with vision, with great charity for the communities in which he lives and operates. He's known to do great charitable works in Africa. He's known to recruit great players worldwide, and he has a championship pedigree."
Ujiri stepped to the microphone next, briefly interrupted by his young son who wanted to be carried, and then laid out the mandate.
"I hope to bring calm. I hope to bring uh to this place winning," Ujiri said. "Yes, we want to get back to winning. This is a winning organization. We want to get back to that. And I know the fan base wants that. I know the organization wants that. I know leadership wants that. I know the NBA wants that. Winning is my drive and winning is going to be the drive of this organization."
The biggest question hovering over the room was the franchise's still-fresh wound: the February trade that sent Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers. Ujiri, asked twice whether he sees a healing process to manage, leaned on a proverb from his Nigerian roots.
"There's a healing process with that. Luka is a Hall of Famer, future Hall of Famer. And that's the past," he said. "I always say in Africa we say when kings go, kings come, and the king went and we have a little prince here that we're going to turn into a king."
The "little prince" is Cooper Flagg, the No. 1 overall pick of the 2025 draft and 2026 NBA Rookie of the Year. Ujiri called Flagg a "generational" talent and made building around him the cornerstone of his early framework.
"The one difficult thing to find anywhere in sports is a generational player. And we have one. We've planted a flag here," he said. "We have one player here that can turn everything and it is so hard to find in sports. It is my job. It is our job to continue to build the young players on this team. All these guys have to figure it out and we put them in the right situations to perform and we build the team from there."
Ujiri pointedly declined to commit to head coach Jason Kidd's status for the 2026-27 season. He revealed that the two had spoken Monday and would meet in person to start the evaluation.
"I had a conversation with Jason Kidd yesterday. I'm going to meet with Jason Kidd," Ujiri said. "Hear his thoughts on everything. Another Hall of Fame player who has done a great job, but we're going to look at this thing from head to toe. That's the right way to look at an organization, evaluate in every single way that we can. I talked to him and I'm going to hear his thoughts on where he sees this."
The new president emphasized that the evaluation extended across every department, including the medical staff that became a controversy point during the Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis injury stretch.
"I want to keep the great people that think about winning. It's that simple for me," Ujiri said. "The focus now is not any distraction. The focus is winning in every single department we have, whether it's medical, coaching, players, everything."
On the rebuild path itself, Ujiri pushed back on the notion that the Mavericks were short on tools to compete. He acknowledged Dallas does not own a first-round pick after this year's draft and that the league's tanking-prevention rule changes will reshape roster construction. But he framed the constraint as a creative problem rather than a hopeless one.
"We have to find the nuance in this game, whether it's free agency, draft picks. Free agency is kind of a little bit dead in some kind of ways," he said. "And the new rules now coming in with the draft and the whole tanking issue. I think it's good that the league solves this issue because some of the games this year were not fun to watch."
Locked On Mavericks host Isaac Harris captured the broader Dallas reaction succinctly. "Aura is back to the franchise. Communication is back to the franchise. Quotable quotes that we're not embarrassed about are back to the franchise."
Ujiri's first major test arrives Sunday with the NBA Draft Lottery. With Cooper Flagg cemented as the foundation and Dallas' small handful of draft assets in his hands, the new boss has roughly seven weeks before the June 23-24 draft to lay down what comes next.
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*Originally published on [NBA News Global](https://nbanews.global/article/masai-ujiri-mavericks-introductory-press-conference-cooper-flagg-jason-kidd-may-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
