Mavericks have golden opportunity to build around Cooper Flagg if they make one (more) bold trade

Sports

add

Cooper Flagg reportedly arrived in Dallas for his meeting with the Mavericks on Tuesday. That visit includes a light workout, but it is a formality. Flagg will be the No. 1 pick in next week’s NBA Draft. The trip is more of a toast, a chance to celebrate what could be a bright future for one of the most talented draft prospects in recent memory and the team he is saving.

And make no mistake, he is a savior whether he leads the Mavericks to a championship or not. He represents something more significant than winning or losing. The Luka Dončić trade nearly fractured the relationship between this team and its fans. Flagg is the Mavs’ chance at mending it. If they support him properly, he can rebuild the trust this city lost in its franchise. He can be the sort of pillar in their community Dirk Nowitzki once was, a Dallas lifer who leads the Mavericks to perennial winning just as Dončić was supposed to.

It wasn’t a failing of his own that cost Dončić that chance. It was the ineptitude of the people running the organization. That ineptitude has now been rewarded with Flagg, but it presents just as much of a threat to his future as it did to Dončić’s.

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Shams Charania speculated that Anthony Davis could net as many as four or five first-round picks in a trade right now. It was not direct reporting, but it was coming from the most plugged-in transactional reporter in the sport. In a world in which Desmond Bane nets four first-round picks and a swap, it’s hard to imagine Davis failing to generate a similar offer. This isn’t a perfect comparison, of course, but the Bane trade was a reminder that a player is worth as much as a single team is willing to pay to get him. Surely, someone wants Anthony Davis, a 10-time All-Star, as badly as Orlando wanted Bane, who has never been selected to an All-Star team.

Davis, through no fault of his own, is the manifestation of that Dallas ineptitude. He is a legendary player. He is not Dončić. He never should have been traded for Dončić. And now that Flagg is here, he is, entirely circumstantially, the thing that is standing between Flagg and building a perennial winner in Dallas.

If the Mavericks trade the 32-year-old Davis for that haul of first-round picks tomorrow, they’ll have set themselves up to rebuild around the 18-year-old Flagg’s timeline. To be clear, in this instance, “rebuild” is not a euphemism for an aimless, multi-year tanking endeavor. It is a quick touch up, a chance to reallocate assets from one era to another without completely sacrificing either. The process here would be relatively straightforward:

• Turn Davis into a mountain of draft picks. If any of the older players are uncomfortable with this new direction, or are impending free agents who you don’t plan to re-sign, trade them as well. But keep the bulk of the supporting cast in place.
• Re-sign Kyrie Irving to a multi-year deal, but sit him out for the 2025-26 campaign as he recovers from a torn ACL. Do not replace him with another guard. Just ride the season out. You don’t have to intentionally try to tank. However, just organically existing in this loaded Western Conference without any guard depth likely leads to a pretty solid 2026 draft pick you can add to the pile.
• Bring Irving back for the start of the 2026-27 season. At that point, you can start shopping the picks acquired in the Davis deal along with the one you earned in 2026 and the one you got from the Lakers in the Dončić trade for another high-impact player, but one who’s a good deal younger and can win with Flagg for an extended period, but also help you win with him as soon as his second year in the NBA.

This is about as clear a plan for reloading around a teenager as any team has ever had. It’s not a teardown. It’s not an extended tank. It’s a realistic assessment of where this team is and where this team is going. This organization was gifted the best 18-year-old in the world, and with him, a chance to build a team capable of winning at a high level for a decade or more. Davis isn’t just 32. He’s 32 with an extensive injury history, a playing style that’s heavily reliant on athleticism that is likely to decline soon, and, despite what we saw in the Orlando bubble, on reliable jump shot. He shouldn’t be on a team that has an 18-year-old wunderkind to consider. He should be on a team betting everything on winning here and now.

Could the Mavericks juggle both? Ask the Warriors how easy it is to balance two timelines. Dallas, admittedly, has a very talented roster. But think of how many things need to go right for the 2025-26 Mavericks (currently seen as +3700 longshots to win the title in 2026, per FanDuel) to genuinely contend for a championship.

• Davis has to remain healthy, and not just in April, May and June, but throughout the regular season just to keep them afloat while they await the return of Kyrie Irving. This is no given. Davis has missed around 32% of his team’s regular-season games over the past six years, and he’s only getting older.
• Irving needs to return from a torn ACL at some point in the middle of the season and get back to something resembling full strength by the playoffs. This, again, is no easy task. A study of ACL tears between 2012 and 2021 showed 29 players suffering the injury. Five of those players were above the age of 30, and three never played in the NBA again. The best-case scenario was Leandro Barbosa, who did so in 11 months, but did so while posting some of the worst stats of his career. The same was true for Jarrett Jack. He was averaging 14.4 points per 36 minutes when he went down. He returned 13 months later and averaged 10.8 for the remainder of his career. Many stars, like Jamal Murray, Derrick Rose and Klay Thompson, have missed full seasons with ACL tears. Even if Irving doesn’t, there’s a real chance that he isn’t himself. He’ll be 34 when the playoffs arrive and has quite a few other injuries on his resume.
• Flagg needs to be ready right away. He’s about as ready as any rookie has been in recent memory, but most rookies tend to impact winning less than their counting stats suggest. Only one player has won a championship and been selected to an All-Rookie Team in the last 40 years: Manu Ginobili. It’s not impossible, but it’s rare. Flagg will probably be a helpful player as rookie, but he won’t be remotely who he’s going to be in his prime yet.
• The Mavericks need to find a guard to get them through Irving’s absence and help out when he’s back. This is doable, but it won’t be easy. Dallas is roughly $1 million below the first apron at the moment. The Mavericks reportedly do not want to trade Daniel Gafford or P.J. Washington, two suddenly redundant role players on expiring contracts, to get one. So they’re either dipping into their limited till of future draft picks or they’re getting someone cheap.
• Dallas will have to overcome the statistical history suggesting that Davis’ teams are better when he plays some center, not power forward exclusively, and properly space the floor with two non-shooting big men frequently on the court.
• They will have to avoid any unexpected calamities. In the NBA, well, unexpected calamities are almost the expectation.

Those are a lot of factors that need to line up just to put the best possible Mavericks team on the floor… and is the best possible Mavericks team even the best team in the Western Conference? Almost certainly not. The Thunder will in all likelihood be a defending champion coming off of a 68-win season in which they posted the greatest point-differential of all time. More likely, the Thunder remain strong conference favorites, and the Mavericks, even at their best, are in a tier with the Lakers, Rockets, Nuggets, Warriors and whoever else bulks up this offseason. However, Irving’s early season absence means they’ll almost certainly face all of those teams without home-court advantage as a lower seed. Their championship odds for next year are not zero, but they’re low. They presumably get lower with each passing season. Improvement on Flagg’s part is likely overshadowed by age- and injury-related decline from Davis and Irving as well as roster losses due to sheer expense. Re-signing Gafford and Washington and ducking the second apron probably isn’t possible.

While it’s usually foolish to try to predict the future in the NBA, the likeliest outcome here is grim. The Mavericks will try in vain to win a championship in the next few years while Davis and Irving are still stars. They will eventually age out of that stardom right as Flagg approaches his own. That will leave the Mavericks to deal with a number of pricey contracts owed to aging players, mitigating the advantage of Flagg’s affordable rookie deal. And with Dallas not controlling its own first-round picks between 2027 and 2030 (thanks again, Nico), the Mavericks won’t have the trade chips to get help Flagg the sort of younger help he’s going to need to win as he approaches his prime. At that point, they’re probably either wasting his prime or potentially even watching him spend it with another team.

This is an avoidable fate. There are road signs warning of the massive pothole ahead. A sufficiently vigilant front office would be steering away from it. But a sufficiently vigilant front office would not have traded Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis in the first place. The people running this team, even if unintentionally, are not acting in its best interests. Harrison seems hellbent on saving face with the bad trade that he made. And if that costs him his best chance at giving Flagg the tools he needs to thrive not just now, but for his entire Mavericks career? Well, Harrison hasn’t even publicly committed to sticking around beyond the end of his contract, and there have been rumblings that he doesn’t plan to, so it just might not be his problem.

His goal, as he’s stated several times, is to win in the next three or four years, and seemingly to do so with his two former Nike contacts, Davis and Irving. But that timeline is fundamentally incompatible with Flagg’s. He’ll just be scratching the surface of what he’s capable of by then, and if this team wants Flagg to become what they hoped Dončić was going to, that has to start with acknowledging and prioritizing his long-term needs.

The only real way to do so is to trade Davis. They just don’t have other levers to pull here. Irving doesn’t have meaningful trade value at the moment. Some of that is the ACL, yes, but some of it is just how mercurial he’s been for his entire career. Dallas has no immediate path to cap space provided they re-sign him, so it’s not as though they’ll be able to find Flagg long-term running mates in free agency. They exist in a world in which teams like the Rockets, Spurs, Thunder, Jazz, Nets and now Grizzlies are hoarding mountains of first-round picks. Their only hope of trading for just about anyone right now is to pray that those teams don’t want them for themselves. They could trade their non-star veterans, but none of them would return anywhere near the package Davis would.

It’s an unfortunate. Davis deserves far better than being treated as the chip the Mavericks use to rebuild around his replacement. But that’s the position Harrison put him in. And the Mavericks are on a ticking clock to realize that. As Charania said, Davis could probably net four or five first-round picks right now. Would that still be the case if he got hurt early in the season? What happens if the most interested parties this summer move on an use their picks for someone else? What if Davis just looks worse with age?

The time to do this is now, while it’s almost certainly on the table. This is a golden opportunity for Dallas to take a meaningful step towards correcting the wrongs of the Dončić trade and setting this organization on a new and brighter path. As unfair as it might be to Davis, it’s a step the Mavericks need to take before it’s too late to ensure Flagg’s future.

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

2025-26 Stanley Cup odds: Oilers — not two-time defending champion Panthers — are favorites to win next year’s Stanley Cup

Sports

Next

trending_flat

Bust-proof Fantasy Football draft picks for 2025 that the Fantasy Football Today team has pinpointed

Sports