Greg St. Jean stepping aside as Mavericks Summer League head coach

Greg St. Jean is stepping aside as the head coach of the Dallas Mavericks Summer League team. In his place, George Galanopoulos, who coaches the Texas Legends, and Mavericks assistant coach Jared Dudley will assume head coaching duties, respectively, for Dallas’ remaining games in Las Vegas.

St. Jean will remain with the team in Vegas. He’ll assume analytics duties alongside Mavericks assistant coach Sean Sweeney and will remain active in the team’s practices. The team’s thinking with this decision is to get Galanopoulos familiar with players he may have on the Legends next season and to give Dudley a taste of higher level coaching.

St. Jean spoke to reporters after the Mavericks 100-99 overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls on Friday about the coaching situation. His full statement:

This is an awesome experience, not just for myself but for the rest of the coaches as well. Summer League is a phenomenal opportunity for the players, the coaches, the staff. Everybody kind of moves up one slot a little bit. I’m very blessed that our organization allowed me to coach today’s game. This is going to be the last game I’m coaching. We’re going to have our G League coach, George Galanopoulos, coach as well as one of our assistant coaches, Jared Dudley. So, I’m a one-and-done, 0-1. We’ll get the new coaches in here.

I think it was just kind of an understanding. We [Jason Kidd and I] had a conversation about it. I’ll always take an opportunity to get head coaching repetition. I think those are always great for me to grow and learn as a coach. But at the same time, once we drafted Jaden, I wanted to make sure I could get my hands on him and be able to start building his foundation correctly. But make no mistake, the next two guys we have up can really coach. They are going to do a great job.

I’m here. I’ll be over with coach Sweeney. We’ll be analyzing. So I’ll still be at all the practices and be heavily involved. I think it’s a really good opportunity for coach George Galanopoulos. Obviously, he’s our G League coach. A lot of these guys might end up playing in the G League for us. So, to get accustomed to his voice, I think that’s really good. And then coach Dudley, obviously Jared, this was his first year coaching. This is a great opportunity for him to get his first head coaching repetitions as well. So, organizationally, we think this is the best of both worlds. Selfishly, I got to coach one game, which was a lot of fun. Wish we could have won, but I’ll gladly take my hands off and let the next guys go.