For basketball fans outside of Dallas, it has become easy to forget that the Mavericks were the Western Conference’s representative in the NBA Finals less than one year ago. It feels like another lifetime ago, given everything that has gone down in Dallas not just since last June, but in the past four months alone.
In an alternate universe, the Mavericks had a solid but unspectacular 2024/25 season en route to another playoff appearance. In that universe, Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving led Dallas to a first-round victory – or at least a competitive first-round series – but couldn’t get the team back to the Finals. In that universe, the Mavs own, say, the No. 20 pick in the NBA draft and we’d be talking now about whether they might include that pick in a trade package to acquire another veteran player who could solidify their place as a legitimate contender as they prepare to put a super-max offer on the table for Doncic.
That’s not the universe we live in though. In this one, Mavericks president of basketball operations Nico Harrison shocked the basketball world – all of the sports world, really – by trading Doncic to the Lakers in February without any advance warning, giving up the chance to lock up a perennial First-Team All-NBA player for the long term.
Harrison’s thinking in that trade, which sent Anthony Davis and Max Christie to Dallas, was that it would make the Mavericks better equipped for title contention in the short term, even if it might shrink their championship window in the long run. So it was a serious problem when Dallas’ rotation was decimated by injuries shortly after they acquired Davis.
You could make a case that the Mavericks’ string of major injuries was simply bad luck, and there’s certainly some truth to that. But Davis has admitted he probably came back too early from the adductor injury he was recovering from at the time of the trade. His eagerness to quell the fan unrest in the days following the Doncic trade likely factored into the decision to rush his Mavs debut. And even though Irving’s ACL tear was more about taking one wrong step than persistent overuse, his spike in usage rate without Doncic likely increased his injury risk.
This isn’t to say that the Doncic trade can be blamed for everything that went wrong in Dallas for the rest of the season, but it did seem to create a domino effect that saw things go from bad to worse for the Mavs down the stretch, scuttling any hopes they had of repeating their NBA Finals appearance — which is why it was such an incredible boon for the organization to win the draft lottery earlier this month.
There will be Mavs fans who never forgive the organization for the decision to trade Doncic, but short of winning a championship, getting the opportunity to replace him with an elite 18-year-old prospect like Cooper Flagg is the best-case scenario the club could have hoped for after pulling the trigger on that controversial deal nearly four months ago.
Suddenly, a team that looked in danger of becoming too old and injury-prone to vie for a title has a reason for long-term optimism again. Now, it’s up to Harrison to do what he can to earn back at least some level of trust from Mavs fans who felt burned by him in February. With the right moves this summer, the idea of Dallas reemerging as an NBA Finals threat next season doesn’t feel quite so far-fetched.
The Mavericks’ Offseason Plan
While the majority of the Mavericks who suffered second-half injuries were able to return before the end of the season and should be just fine this fall, Irving is the glaring exception. His recovery from ACL surgery is expected to extend well into 2025/26, which creates two significant issues for the Mavs — they need to determine how to handle his contract situation this summer while also adding a player capable of filling in at the point during Kyrie’s lengthy recovery process.
