The Mavericks filled out Dusty May’s first NBA coaching staff on Wednesday, and the list carries a lot more league experience than you would expect from a head coach who has never worked a day in the NBA.
Willie Green, Garrett Temple, Joe Boylan, Drew Williamson, Mody Maor, Rob Fodor and Sam Hershberger will serve as assistants. Nate Mitchell gets a dual role, head coach of the G League’s Texas Legends plus a seat on the Dallas bench. Tyson Chandler and Quincy Acy return in player development.
Willie Green is the hire that matters
Green is May’s top assistant, and that is the most important line in the entire release. He spent four-plus seasons as head coach of the Pelicans, went 150-190, reached the playoffs twice and was fired in November 2025 after a 2-10 start.
A head coaching record in New Orleans usually says more about the training room than the bench. What Green brings to Dallas is four years of knowing what an 82-game season does to a rotation, what a February road trip feels like, and how to talk to grown men with guaranteed contracts and strong opinions about their minutes.
May has never had to manage any of that. He has coached players who could be benched, redshirted or run into the ground. Green has coached players who cannot be. That gap is precisely where college hires fail in the NBA, and Dallas put someone in the room who has already lived on the other side of it.
Temple walked away from a long playing career to take this job, which gives May a second voice in the huddle that every player in the league already respects. Boylan was with Memphis in 2024-25. Williamson came over from May’s Michigan staff, so at least one person on the bench speaks his exact language.
The jump is real, and so is the resume
May is 49 and just won the 2026 NCAA Tournament with Michigan, beating UConn 69-63 for the program’s first title since 1989 after a 29-2 regular season that earned him Big Ten Coach of the Year. Before that he built Florida Atlantic from an afterthought into a Final Four team.
He replaces Jason Kidd, fired in May in one of the first major swings by new team president Masai Ujiri. Handing a roster built around Cooper Flagg to a college coach with zero NBA background is an enormous bet on process over pedigree.
Our take: this one works
College-to-NBA jumps fail for predictable reasons. The coach installs a college practice schedule, loses the room by Christmas and cannot adjust fast enough once the league solves his half-court sets. Brad Stevens and Billy Donovan made it work. Plenty of others did not last two years.
May has advantages those failures lacked. He has a former NBA head coach sitting two seats down, a just-retired veteran guard who played almost two decades in the league, and a young roster with no entrenched hierarchy to defend. He is not walking into a veteran team that needs convincing.
The bet here pays off. Ujiri did not hire a college coach and then surround him with more college coaches, which is the mistake that sinks these experiments. He hired a proven builder and then bought him the NBA institutional knowledge he was missing.
May’s first game on an NBA bench comes Oct. 9 against the Rockets at the Venetian Arena in Macao, China, in the preseason. A strange place to begin a career, which feels about right for a man who was cutting down nets in Indianapolis five months ago.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.