Mavericks reportedly considering two-timeline approach, but they’re barely equipped to handle one

If the Dallas Mavericks want to compete for the 2026 NBA championship, they’re probably going to need to invest more of their future into the present. No, that doesn’t necessarily mean trading Cooper Flagg after they miraculously won the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery, but dangling what limited youth and draft capital they still have is probably necessary. With Kyrie Irving injured, Dallas is currently without an offensive engine or really any backcourt scoring for at least the beginning of next season. Anthony Davis comes with major injury issues himself. The roster is far from optimized with Davis playing power forward and Flagg playing small forward, so major investments in more immediate talent are probably necessary here if the Mavericks want to compete with teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder.

If the Dallas Mavericks want to compete for championships in the late 2020s and the early 2030s, they’re probably going to have to sell some of their present to bolster their future. They control none of their own draft picks between 2027 and 2030. Dereck Lively is their only young player that has even proven capable of starting for a good team. Flagg is probably going to need a guard to set him up even at his peak, but Irving is 33. Davis is 32. When Flagg is starting to peak, they’ll likely have aged out of stardom, and without those draft picks, they won’t have an easy path to replacing that lost star power, so if Dallas wants to optimize for Flagg’s prime, they probably should trade Davis for a haul right now, avoid a long-term Irving extension and prepare for a few rebuilding years at the expense of the present.

Every team faces this dilemma in some form or another. Unless you’re a team like Oklahoma City that stuffed its war chest by trading away multiple stars and then successfully drafted new ones, planning to compete in both the short- and long-term usually isn’t feasible. If you don’t go all-in on the present, you’re usually going to lose to a team that did. If you don’t hoard assets for the future, you’ll usually get outbid for top-level talent on the trade market by the teams that did. Generally speaking, it is advisable to pick a timeline.

It doesn’t seem as though the Mavericks plan to do so. As The Athletic’s Christian Clark noted Tuesday, all indications suggest that the Mavericks are about to embark upon a two-timeline roster build that aims to both compete for a championship now with Davis and Irving as the focal points and contend later on once Flagg has grown into his expected stardom. But the reality of NBA history is that planning for two timelines usually means shortchanging both of them.

Take the recent Golden State Warriors as an infamous example. Yes, they won the 2022 championship at the beginning of their ill-fated two timelines era, but that had little to do with the young players they hoped to eventually rebuild around.

Just look at their playoff rotation in 2022. Nine players played at least 150 minutes in the 2022 postseason. Three of them were stalwarts in their 30s: Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. Three were older free agents: Otto Porter Jr., Gary Payton II and Nemanja Bjelica were all 28 or older. Andrew Wiggins was only 26, but his acquisition was somewhat anomalous. The Warriors were willing to pay historic tax bills to fit D’Angelo Russell into Kevin Durant’s vacated salary slot, and then flipped Russell to get Wiggins. That maneuver wouldn’t even be legal anymore. Kevon Looney was 25 and Jordan Poole was 22, but they were both happy accidents drafted at the end of the first round during the dynasty years.

The young players the Warriors were heavily invested in weren’t a huge part of the playoff run. Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody played sparingly, their two lottery picks from the previous draft, played sparingly. James Wiseman was hurt and didn’t play at all. There might have been two timelines on the team, but only one of them won the championship, and it did so under a number of circumstances the Mavericks can’t replicate.

The Warriors had a top-10 player of all time. The Mavericks don’t have a top-10 player in the NBA. The Warriors had three homegrown stars who had spent the previous decade together. The Mavericks just united Davis and Irving in February, they’ve barely played together, and Flagg hasn’t debuted yet. The Warriors were able to take advantage of a number of cap loopholes to amass a historic amount of salary on its roster. The current CBA prevents the Mavericks from doing the same. The Warriors beat a relatively standard set of opponents. The Mavericks exist at the same time as a historically dominant Oklahoma City team, not to mention the asset-rich teams that took a similarly roster-building approach like San Antonio and Houston that are rising to oppose it. The Warriors didn’t have to spend all of their youth and picks to build their 2022 champion because they had all of those other factors in their favor. The Mavericks don’t.

And just look at what happened after the Warriors won the 2022 championship. Poole and Kuminga probably needed to spend their formative years on bad teams that could develop them as high-usage scorers. The Warriors tried and failed to make them fit in as role players. Moody is a role player on paper, but the Warriors spent so many years yanking his minutes around that he hasn’t grown as much as expected either. Wiseman likely would have busted no matter where he’d been drafted, but asking him to play in a motion offense when he was probably best-suited to running standard pick-and-roll as a lob threat likely didn’t help. Over time, the Warriors gave up on the two timelines approach. Wiseman and Poole were dumped in trades. Golden State made a splashy veteran addition in Jimmy Butler at the 2025 deadline. Kuminga fell out of the rotation as a result. The Warriors tried two timelines. They settled for one.

Keep in mind: the Warriors have earned the benefit of the doubt. They’d already won three championships when they embarked on their two-timeline scheme. Nico Harrison has won none and just made what was considered before the Flagg lottery to be among the worst trades in NBA history when he dealt Luka Dončić to the Lakers. If the Mavericks fired Harrison and hired Bob Myers right now, you could almost talk yourself into this approach even after his own Warriors failed to execute it. Harrison just hasn’t earned the same benefit of the doubt.

The likeliest outcome for the 2025-26 season is that, with Irving sidelined, the Mavericks are no better than a lower playoff seed and perhaps have to fight their way into the playoffs through the Play-In Tournament. They would then be enormous underdogs to reach the Finals in a loaded Western Conference, and that’s before factoring in the health of Davis. For all of those reasons, they’re likely an early exit next season.

Maybe Irving is at full strength on opening night of the 2026-27 season, but what does full strength look like for him as a 34-year-old coming off of a torn ACL? He’s a 6-foot-2 guard. Only nine players at 6-foot-2 or shorter have made an All-Star Game in their age-34 season or later, and three of them came before the merger. He’s probably going to be a worse player two seasons from now. The same is probably true of Davis. P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford are 2026 free agents. If they get more expensive, the Mavericks feel that elsewhere on the roster. If they trade those players for guard help now, that guard probably won’t be cheap either. They’ve been linked to the 34-year-old Jrue Holiday, who’s already starting to age.

Dallas, in all likelihood, is not good enough to win right now, but if the Mavs actively try to, where does that leave Flagg? How do they expect to build around him at a draft pick deficit when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and Amen Thompson all already have scary cores around them are operating at a significant pick surplus? Flagg is going to be at a significant disadvantage against teams like that. It’s far, far too early to be thinking this way, but this is the NBA. You know what happens when a top young player repeatedly finds himself on undermanned rosters playing against juggernauts. He leaves.

That’s what a two-timeline approach is setting the Mavericks up for. They’re probably not gonna be good enough in the present, but their refusal to let go of the present will probably prevent them from being good enough in the future. The smart move here is to invest in that future. Do this right, as Dirk Nowitzki showed you, and Flagg could spend two decades as a hero in Dallas. He could help the fans get over the heartbreak of the Dončić trade and build a sustainable winner. Davis still has tremendous trade value. This path is still on the table.

Of course, Davis still has tremendous trade value for a reason. He’s still a great player. As risky as it is, the Mavericks could justify going the other way as well. They can still put multiple first-round picks on the table to go get better right now. That would still put Flagg in a precarious position several years from now, but winning enough right now might buy enough goodwill for him to trust the team to figure it out. This isn’t the path I’d advise. It’s a semi-plausible given how much star-level talent is going to be available this offseason.

The Flagg timeline is probably more promising, but the Davis-Irving timeline doesn’t necessarily need to be a write-off either. Either of them have championship potential if they are handled properly. But balancing the two just isn’t feasible. If the Warriors needed to pick a lane, the Mavericks are going to need to as well.