The acrimony worsened after the team lost the series to San Antonio. Cuban, in negotiations to extend Mr. Nelson’s contract in the summer of 2003, offered the coach what Nelson regarded as a pay cut, say people who were privy to the negotiations according to the Wall Street Journal report. As with today, their contract dispute centered on millions of dollars of compensation that Nelson had agreed to defer back in the Perot years—money Mr. Cuban wanted to slash.

With Nelson openly threatening to quit coaching, they reached a last-minute compromise: Nelson got a three-year contract extension as the Mavericks’ coach and general manager - at $5.1 million a year - but no pay raise, despite the team’s success.

“Nellie went ahead and signed that contract but the trust was broken,” says a close friend who helped broker the deal.

At the end of the 2004 season Steve Nash a player cut in the mold of Nelson left the Mavericks signing a free agent contract with the Phoenix Suns. Nelson had had enough of Cuban, Nash’s back-to-back MVP’s proved who was right when it came to how valuable a basketball player Steve Nash would become and was ready to leave.

As the WSJ reported in March of 2005, Mr. Nelson, moping and depressed, relinquished his coaching job to Mr. Johnson, whom he had been grooming as his assistant. Mr. Cuban agreed to keep paying Mr. Nelson, now a Dallas hero, through the end of his contract in June of 2006.

“By then, neither one of those guys could stand to be in the same room,” says Frank Zaccanelli, a Dallas real-estate developer who was a minority partner and president of the Mavericks in the 1990s.

The Dallas Morning News reported in late October Nelson had filed a lawsuit against Cuban to recover the alleged $6.6 million he was owed on his contract.

“First, it’s not a grudge match,” Cuban offered in a series of e-mail’s to the media. “If we put on sumo outfits at halftime, then maybe.”

“It’s an issue Nellie’s lawyer threatened he would try to resolve in the press,” Cuban writes, “and he has followed through.

“I prefer to let the lawyers do their job.”

“Mark Cuban has been very good to me and my family,” Nelson said when news of the lawsuit became public “but he doesn’t like me very much.”

“We reached an agreement and I thought we were going to walk away and be friends forever, but it hasn’t worked out that way,” Nelson said. “It’s not my doing. I wanted to take the high road the whole way out of here, and he hasn’t let me do that.”

“No one ever asked us permission for him to coach Golden State,” Cuban said. “That’s a whole other issue. If he was trying to negotiate some things knowing he had another job and us not knowing, or if he had the possibility of another job …

“I just want to put all this to rest. I’m tired of ‘Aren’t I wonderful, isn’t he mean to me.’ I mean, come on.”

from this webpage:

and because the GM is out somewhere, he’ll end up doing it himself.

Nobody thought paxson was retarted until after this season started and the bulls went down the crapper. The ben wallace signing for Chandler was always handled with;
“well wallace still is more productive then chandler was, and Chandler was a crappy player till he met chris paul.”

This brought along the argument, that "if kirk hinrich was half the player chris paul was Chandler would be dominating for the bulls, we would never have gotten ben wallace, and we would be ruling the east."

This thought brought along, "Its all paxsons fault, he signed kirk hinrich to an enormous contract even though he is not a pure pg or floor leader. Speaking of contracts, paxson paid nocioni and wont pay deng or gordon, i see this is all paxsons fault right from the begining" 
....had this season panned out alright, no one would question paxsons move (except the noch signing i guess) and we would be  chanting "IN PAX WE TRUST!"

Hindsight is a virtue for the naive. Making changes is necessary, but at the same time i also feel alot of the people in this organization deserve at least one more shot at trying to fix this mess. This is how i feel, and perhaps im the one being naive.

all of his cards, nor name names, and I agree that Pax is just simply in a difficult position. Part of the frustruation with his press statements was just leftovers from the season.

Still, he could have been more straightforward. He could have said, “The coaching search is well underway. I have a lot of specific candidates in mind, and although I’d love to name them, I hope that the fans will respect the process enough to know that I simply can’t divulge the names at this point.

I’m aware that there are a number of names available, and that these are individuals whose coaching styles and offensive and defensive philosophies differ. The most important factor is that we hire someone who can teach our young and promising basketball team.”

Obviously, there’s a subjective sense of “what sounds better” going on here. But that’s my attempt at scrubbing his language of soft and meaningless “feel-good” type phrases.