The Dallas Mavericks have dismissed director of health and performance Johann Bilsborough on Monday, marking the fourth consecutive year that the franchise has made major changes in that department, sources told ESPN.
The dismissal came the day after the Mavs’ injury-marred 2025-26 season ended.
The expectation is that Bilsborough’s replacement will be hired by the Mavs’ new lead basketball operations executive after that position is filled, sources said. Governor Patrick Dumont hopes to have made a new hire in that position by mid-May.
Bilsborough spent two turbulent seasons in Dallas, which failed to make the playoffs the last two years on the heels of a trip to the 2024 NBA Finals. The decision to part ways with him was based on wanting a fresh start and new ideology in the team’s health and performance group, sources said.
Former general manager Nico Harrison hired Bilsborough, an Australian sports scientist with a doctorate who had previously worked for the New England Patriots and Boston Celtics, as his hand-picked replacement for Casey Smith.
Harrison fired Smith in August 2023, unceremoniously ending his two-decade tenure with the franchise. Smith sat out the final season of his contract before joining the New York Knicks as the vice president of sports medicine.
The Knicks won the NBA Trainers Association’s Training Staff of the Year award last season, Smith’s first with the franchise. Under his direction, Dallas won the award in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
At the end of last season, the Mavs fired first-year athletic performance director Keith Belton, who had clashed with Bilsborough, including a heated confrontation at the practice facility after Belton put center Dereck Lively II through an intense return-to-play workout a day before a CT scan revealed a stress fracture in the big man’s ankle.
Belton had replaced longtime Mavs strength and conditioning coach Jeremy Holsopple, who was fired in the wake of the Mavs’ Finals trip and was hired by the Los Angeles Lakers as their athletic performance director before this season.
