Shams Charania used his weekly Pat McAfee Show appearance to walk listeners through the chain of decisions that led to Jason Kidd's exit from the Dallas Mavericks, framing the firing as the inevitable conclusion of a months-long reset triggered by new president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri.
McAfee opened the segment with the same question Mavericks fans were asking on social media. "Jason Kid's fired. Okay, that comes out of nowhere," McAfee said. "Then people start putting out his record even before the Luca trade, post Luca trade. How the team has been, and seems like all the stats that people are shoving into my algorithm warrant or justify a firing. Why do we think this happened?"
Charania pointed to the executive overhaul that began the moment Ujiri arrived from Toronto. "You have to look at the leadership that's now coming in," Charania said. "Messai Ujiri, he was a long time, 12 years he spent in Toronto as a vice chairman there. Now he gets the president job, the alternate governor job in Dallas, and he has full authority to do whatever he wants with the direction of this team."
The Athletic's NBA insider laid out the sequence in plain numbers. "In the last seven months you trade Nico, you trade Anthony Davis, you fire Nico Harrison, and now you fire Jason Kidd," he said. "And when I talk to people around that organization the last 24 hours, you think about the residue that's all come from the trade of Luca Doncic and everything that's come out of that. You've had an owner there in Patrick Dumont who's admitted that he made a mistake by greenlighting that trade."
Charania confirmed Kidd was not the architect of the Doncic deal but was tagged with sympathy for it. "He wasn't making the trade, but Mavs sources do believe that he had a level of support for that trade," Charania said. "So Messai Ujiri comes in and I think for him it's a complete restart, a clean slate, a fresh start for the entire organization."
The financial picture made the move even more striking. "For them to move off of Jason Kidd right now, Pat, they're eating four years and almost $45 million to get off of Jason Kidd and essentially wash their hands of the situation," Charania said. "This is all because team leadership wants a clean start."
McAfee summarized the optics in a mock dialogue with Anthony Davis, who arrived in Dallas as the headline asset in the Doncic trade and was subsequently dealt for salaries and picks. "You're fired first. Okay, I'm gonna let you know that right now. You definitely you're out of here first," McAfee joked. He then captured the broader purge in one line: "This is Cooper Flag's team. We are going to eliminate the thought that Mark Cuban's the owner, that Luca was here, that we traded his ass away."
Charania agreed the cleansing has been deliberate and total. "Forget anyone involved with just the Luca Doncic trade — we've seen Patrick Dumont, the owner, essentially flush away anyone that was even around the Mark Cuban regime," he said. "Nico Harrison, Jason Kidd, they were all brought in by Mark Cuban."
The only constant Charania identified is the player Dallas drafted to anchor the next decade. "You still have Kyrie Irving on this team who you feel like has a future with Cooper Flagg," he said. "Everything around this organization, that's the one element of the team that's not going to change. It's Cooper Flagg." For Ujiri, the message to fans is that the rebuild around Flagg starts now — and the receipts will arrive next summer.
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*Originally published on [NBA News Global](https://nbanews.global/article/shams-pat-mcafee-mavs-clean-slate-luka-trade-kidd-fired-may-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
