In the months leading up to the 2025-26 NBA season, the Dallas Mavericks were viewed as a legitimate threat to the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder. Less than three months into the season, however, they are reeling at 12th in the West with a 12-21 record. The team has already fired its general manager, and the player acquired in the Luka Doncic trade, Anthony Davis, now finds himself at the forefront of trade rumors.
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By no means has Davis done poorly this season. He has played 16 games, averaging 20.5 points, 10.9 rebounds, and 2.8 assists. These are not Luka Doncic numbers, but given that the entire team has been having a hit-and-miss season, they are far from disappointing. The bigger issue is availability. Davis has missed 16 games due to a calf injury and its ongoing management.
To make it worse, the Mavs are in a situation where they could be rebuilding the entire roster around No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg. That is why moving Davis, to wash away the sour taste of having traded Doncic for him midway through last season, makes some sense. However, NBA analyst Rachel Nichols does not believe that is the right path forward.
On an episode of Open Floor, Nichols went back to the time when Kyrie Irving got injured and asserted that if there was ever a time to move Davis away, that was it. Without Irving, they would have never had the team that former GM Nico Harrison envisioned when “he made that ludicrous trade.”
Nichols went on to explain that the next right moment to trade Davis would have been when they got lucky and landed Cooper Flagg. But the Mavs couldn’t do that because Harrison had already played all his cards, and he simply couldn’t send Davis away without looking bad.
The next right moment, Nichols laid out, was when the Mavs front desk sent Harrison packing after a disastrous start to the season.
Moving on to the current situation that the Mavs find themselves in, Nichols asked, “Has Anthony Davis been injured so often that he has wrecked his trade value? If the answer is yes, the decision tree flops! Now, the answer is, ‘No, play it out.'”
“That’s the problem,” she pointed out, adding, “The problem is, they took three different opportunities, when three major things happened to their franchise and didn’t deal him [away]. And now, you are stuck in a situation, where he has almost no trade value, and now you have to make a different decision.”
Nichols suggested that the Mavericks need to wait until they can find a better deal for Davis. Co-host Chris Mannix concurred, adding that less than a couple of years after trading the face of their franchise away, they simply couldn’t trade the best asset they got for him for a quarter on the dollar.
Nichols also argued that when Davis is healthy, he does bring a lot to the table. “First of all, he’s a good teammate. People like Anthony. He’s a good guy in the locker room. He’s someone who’s easy-going. So, he’s not a cancer. He’s not someone who is going to ruin Cooper Flagg. In fact, quite the opposite. Cooper and he seem to get along well,” she explained.
Nichols noted that Davis is a veteran of the sport, and he has been teaching Flagg all he could. The only major issue she sees with him right now is that he has missed 14 games due to a calf strain, which are notoriously recurring. So Davis is likely to miss more games in the future.
That said, the Mavs don’t really have much of an option right now. Their best bet is to hope Kyrie Irving comes back and that Davis can partner up with him and give the fans a few good weeks of basketball before the summer transfer window.
