The Mavericks were 0-3 this past week and remain in 12th place in the West. They lost to Boston (110-100) and San Antonio twice (135-123, 138-125). Cooper Flagg led the team in scoring with 27.3 points per game. P.J. Washington returned from a concussion, while Kyrie Irving (knee) remained out, and Khris Middleton has yet to make his debut as a Maverick.
The Mavericks have lost seven in a row. Now that Anthony Davis has officially been traded, I think it is okay to say that improving their draft position is what is best for the organization. In fact, the way Dallas has lost these games has been ideal. They play hard every night, they’re running the offense through Cooper Flagg, and they play fun games. It is not blatant tanking; they truly are just worse than the teams they play.
That being said, their defense was putrid this week. They had a defensive rating of 123.5 in the three games they played, which would be last in the NBA this season. The Celtics and Spurs play fast and shoot a lot of threes, which does not bode well for the Mavericks’ two-point-heavy offense. The bookend games of this stretch were not as close as the score said, and the middle contest didn’t give me enough to not dock the Mavericks a couple of grades for their porous defense. Dallas has just two games, one in Phoenix and one in Los Angeles, left before the All-Star break.
Straight A’s: The Mavericks’ front office
The Mavericks, for the fifth-consecutive February, have made a significant trade. They dealt Anthony Davis to Washington, along with Dante Exum, D’Angelo Russell, and Jaden Hardy, for three expiring contracts, second-year player AJ Johnson, two late first-round picks, and three second-round picks. Make no mistake about it: this trade was a grand slam.
If you don’t pay attention to the economics of basketball (first of all, good for you. It is miserable to think about), this trade may seem strange on the surface. Davis was voted onto the NBA’s 75th anniversary team, cementing him as one of the 75 best players to ever play. And now he gets traded as a salary dump with lower-tier picks coming back? Unfortunately, the trade is more nuanced than that.
Dallas needed to do three things at the trade deadline Thursday: create flexibility to build around Cooper Flagg, recoup draft capital, and most importantly, turn the page on the disastrous Luka Doncic trade. They did all three in one fell swoop. The draft compensation is nothing crazy, as the first round picks are Oklahoma City’s this year and Golden State’s in 2030, which will stay with the Warriors if they get a top 20 pick. It effectively rubs out to five second-rounders. But the cap implications of the trade are incredibly important, even though they aren’t sexy.
The second apron, a salary number with a very high tax rate, makes it incredibly hard for teams that exceed it to build. Trades are restricted, free agent signings are hard-capped, and, if you stay over the second apron for three seasons, your first-round pick automatically goes to the end of the round. When the Celtics exceed the second apron in salary while they’re winning a championship, it makes sense. But when the Mavericks are doing it while jockeying for a top-five draft pick, it becomes lethal. Now that Dallas is not only under the second apron but under the tax line altogether, the flexibility this off-season increases tenfold, making a rebuild much easier.
Additionally, Hardy, Russell, and Davis were all bad or injured. They were not pieces of the future, and keeping them around would have been delaying the inevitable. The Mavericks have a clean slate now. There are no lingering questions; it is all about Cooper Flagg going forward.
Currently Failing: Nico Harrison’s vision
This week ended the local nightmare that was the Anthony Davis experience. As history will show, Davis appeared in 29 games for the Mavericks, leaving with an injury in the first and last of those, averaging 20.2 points and 10.8 rebounds. The highest high was the 30 minutes he played against Houston in his first appearance, and the lowest low was just two months later when he scored a measly 13 points on 5-of-13 from the field in a loss to the Lakers. It was not a good look while his counterpart, Luka Doncic, returned to score 45 points on Dallas’s home floor.
And so, we can officially grade the Luka Doncic trade, only a year after it was completed. I give it a big, fat F, in as bold a font as you can find. Harrison said last April: “I believe winning will help repair the relationship with the fans—and that’s what we plan to do next year”. The Mavericks are currently 19-33, firmly outside the playoffs. He maintained that he thought he was doing “a really good job” before he lost that job just seven months later. His “defense wins championships” assertion looks questionable as the Lakers own the 22nd-ranked defense, but the seventh-most wins. The entire experiment crashed and burned as quickly and poetically as possible. If not for Cooper Flagg, Harrison’s vision would have Dallas in a place no team ever wants to be: purgatory.
Extra Credit: Marvin Bagley
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Bagley was a part of the return for Anthony Davis, and he did not disappoint in his first game as a Maverick. He tallied a double-double with 16 points and 12 rebounds, while blocking four shots. Eight of those 12 rebounds were offensive, setting the record for a Mavericks debut. He looked energized to play in a new city and, given that he is up for a new contract in the off-season, looked motivated to cement himself as a piece on this team going forward. Bagley, of course, was picked one spot higher than Luka Doncic in 2018 and was a highly touted prospect out of Duke. His career has not quite been what many expected, but with plenty of opportunity the last two months and low expectations, he could be the latest former lottery pick to rejuvenate his career in Dallas.