Jason Kidd’s bid to become the Dallas Mavericks’ president of basketball operations reportedly ended before Masai Ujiri ever walked through the door. ESPN’s Tim MacMahon said on the Hoop Collective that Kidd “did try to become the president” and had “known for months that wasn’t going to happen.”
That matters because Ujiri’s arrival did not come with ambiguity. MacMahon said the Mavericks were “bringing in somebody who was not involved and bringing into the organization to be the president,” then made the power structure plain: “Masai Ujiri is the boss, period.”
The timing lines up with Ujiri’s introductory press conference on Tuesday, when he repeatedly framed the job around one word: winning. He said, “I hope to bring calm. I hope to bring to this place winning,” and added, “This is a winning organization. We want to get back to that.”
Ujiri also made it clear that every part of the franchise is under review, including Kidd’s role. “I’m going to meet with Jason Kidd, hear his thoughts on everything,” he said, before adding, “we’re going to look at this thing from head to toe.”
That is a sharp shift for a Mavericks organization that has spent months rebuilding its direction after the Luka Doncic trade and the fallout around it. Ujiri acknowledged that reality directly, saying, “There’s a healing process with that.”
He also tied the franchise’s future to Cooper Flagg, calling him “a generational player” and saying, “We have one player here that can turn everything.” For Ujiri, the basketball hierarchy is now centered on a new front office voice, not the coach who once hoped to move upward.
Kidd’s standing is not settled, but the message from the top is not hard to read. Ujiri said, “The focus now is not any distraction. The focus is winning in every single department we have,” and the reporting around Kidd suggests the Mavericks already chose their direction before the introduction ever started.
The next step is whether Kidd stays in place under a new boss, or whether the evaluation Ujiri described leads somewhere else. Either way, the Mavericks’ new era began with one loud clarification: the top chair belongs to Masai Ujiri.
