Mark Cuban says there were two former Mavericks he never wanted to move, even as Dallas kept turning the roster over to match Luka Doncic’s timeline.
On Von Miller’s “Free Range” show, Cuban pointed to Wesley Matthews and Harrison Barnes as players he genuinely liked keeping around. “Teams go through cycles.
If you know, 10-year veteran, if the team’s going young, right, there’s players, Wesley Matthews, that I never wanted to trade,” Cuban explained. “There’s just guys that I really liked a lot, Harrison Barnes.
But if you’re going to go young and build around Luka, you got to come in and bring in younger players. And like we traded for Kristaps Porzingis.
Didn’t work out the way we expected.”
That’s the tension in Dallas’ recent past: veteran stability versus a hard pivot toward youth. Barnes and Matthews were respected voices in the room, but the Mavericks were already drifting below .500 during Doncic’s rookie season, and the front office chose to chase a different direction.
Matthews ended up as part of the blockbuster Porzingis deal, with Dallas hoping Porzingis would pair cleanly with Doncic as a stretch big. It never really clicked the way the team imagined. The Mavericks made the playoffs a few times with that setup, but the real breakthrough came only after Porzingis was gone.
Matthews, meanwhile, kept bouncing around the league before retiring in 2024. Even if he remained a useful veteran presence, he clearly wasn’t the same player he had been earlier in his career.
Barnes’ exit was more abrupt. Dallas traded him to the Sacramento Kings mid-game for Zach Randolph and Justin Jackson.
At the time, the return looked thin, especially with Barnes having started all 49 games he played up to that point. The move was mostly about opening future salary space.
In hindsight, that’s the part that stings. The Mavericks didn’t do much with the cap room, and they spent years trying to find a real starting wing.
Dorian Finney-Smith gave them solid minutes, but the rotation still leaned on names like Tim Hardaway Jr., Josh Richardson and Reggie Bullock. Barnes, Cuban’s comments suggest, was better than that group.
It wasn’t until the Mavericks traded for P.J. Washington that they finally felt like they had starting-caliber wings again.
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