Former NBA Player Blasts Jason Kidd After His Mavericks Firing

The Dallas Mavericks had it all out in front of them.

All-NBA and All-Star guard Luka Doncic was the reigning NBA scoring champion, and he led the Mavericks on a tear through the Western Conference - the last team to defeat the Oklahoma City Thunder in a playoff series - to reach the 2024 NBA Finals.

While the Mavericks lost the Finals to the Boston Celtics in five games, it was still considered a wildly successful season, mostly because it was assumed that Doncic would be around to win rings in Dallas for years to come. Head coach Jason Kidd even got a contract extension out of it.

Then, roughly eight months later, in February 2025, the Mavericks inexplicably traded Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and a 2029 first-round pick. Dallas finished last season 39-43 and this season 26-56, and not a trace of the blockbuster Doncic trade remains.

General manager Nico Harrison was fired last November. Davis was traded to Washington this February. And now, Kidd is out as head coach.

ESPN’s Tim MacMahon reported Tuesday that Kidd and the Mavericks had mutually parted ways, even though Kidd has four years and over $40 million left on his contract. The move seems to have been the call of newly hired team president Masai Ujiri.

Regardless of how it went down, former NBA guard Michael Carter-Williams wasn’t surprised to hear the news.

An X user named BC wrote, “Years ago, a Nike exec told me that JKidd is gonna get fired from every coaching job he gets because for as good as he is at X's & O's and player development, over time he becomes insufferable and his personality starts to weigh on people.”

Carter-Williams replied, “I've been trying to tell people this for 10 years now… truth always prevails.”

Carter-Williams, a former Syracuse star and first-round draft pick in 2013, played the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons under Kidd for the Milwaukee Bucks.

Kidd is a Hall of Fame guard who played 19 seasons in the league for Dallas, the then-New Jersey Nets, Phoenix Suns, and New York Knicks before entering coaching. His first head coaching job was with the Brooklyn Nets in 2013-14, followed by the Bucks (2014-18) and the Mavericks.

Kidd went 205-205 across five regular seasons in Dallas, and his Mavericks teams went 22-18 in the playoffs. The Mavericks haven’t made the playoffs since trading Doncic.

Luckily for Mavericks fans, the franchise improbably landed the No. 1 overall pick last year and has Cooper Flagg, the 2025-26 Rookie of the Year, in place for a new regime to build around.

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This story was originally published May 20, 2026 at 9:19 PM.