It’s been an up and down 10 months or so for the Dallas Mavericks. First they traded beloved franchise centerpiece Luka Doncic away, to the Lakers of all teams. Then they got incredibly lucky and won the NBA Draft lottery, which allowed them to select Cooper Flagg. That wasn’t enough to vault the team back to contention though, and after a dismal start to the season, general manager Nico Harrison was fired.
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With Harrison gone, there have been two opposing schools of thought on what the Mavs should do. Do they bide their time and wait for Kyrie Irving’s return from his ACL tear in the hopes that they can get back into the playoff picture? Or do they trade Anthony Davis to erase the bad taste of the Luka trade, along with their other veterans, to start fresh around Flagg?
After the Mavs lost on Christmas Day to the Golden State Warriors, Charles Barkley believes they should follow the latter plan, and he said so on Inside the NBA.
“It’s time to do a full rebuild down in Dallas,” he said. “They’re not one of the four best teams in the West. They’re not.”
That’s quite an understatement, because not only are the Mavs not a top-four team, they’re on the outside looking in on the play-in tournament as the West’s 11th seed. They’ve played better of late in winning seven of their past 12 games, but are still closer to the last-place Kings (four games), than they are to the eighth-place Warriors (4.5 games).
Kenny Smith didn’t agree with Barkley’s take. He believes the Mavs should play this out at least a bit longer, because it will benefit Flagg to have veterans like Kyrie and AD around.
“I think a good way to do it is kinda the way Kevin Durant was brought into the league,” he said.
“He was brought in and Ray Allen was there kind of on his last of Ray Allen and being the go-to guy. So now, even though [Flagg] is getting 27 and 29, when you have an AD and when you have a Kyrie, for that one year, you dn’t have to have … that pressure of being the guy that they’re double-teaming every night, and it could stunt your growth,” the Hall of Famer added.
Shaquille O’Neal agreed with Kenny, saying he’d like to see the whole team play together for a while with everyone healthy. Therein lies the rub though, because no reasonable person could count on the Mavs being healthy.
Who knows what 33-year-old Kyrie is going to look like on a repaired ACL? Davis’ health is a ticking time bomb, and sure enough, he left in the first half last night with a strained groin.
Flagg has been flourishing, and he scored an efficient 27 points to lead the team in scoring for the sixth time in the last 12 games. It’s clear that he’s well on his way to fulfilling his promise as one of the most highly touted prospects of the last few decades.
The best thing the Mavs can do for him is not to keep the vets around in hopes of eking into the playoffs this year, but trading those unreliable pieces away in order to build a better future.
If the Mavs wait until the season is done, they won’t get as good a return on any trade, so the time is now. The trade deadline is February 5th, and though they do have their own first-round pick in next summer’s draft, they should try to get as many bites of the apple as they can in what again should be a dynamite rookie class.
Get Flagg the help he needs to contend for the next decade and wash away the last remnants of Harrison in one fell swoop.
