September 30, 2026
September 30, 2026
Dallas Mavericks’ 2025-26 Season
The Mavericks’ 2025-26 season began with a wound that had never closed. Nico Harrison had shipped Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers the previous February. The fury never really faded. It followed the franchise into training camp. It followed Harrison into his own arena, where chants demanding his firing became a nightly ritual. Into that storm walked a teenage rookie carrying more hope than any newcomer should have to bear. A former NBA champion guard arrived too, rehabbing an ACL that would never let him take the floor. A front office stood ready to be gutted from the inside. The Mavericks’ 2025-26 season would end in the lottery again, but not before it tested exactly how much dysfunction one fan base could absorb.
Fortune rarely visits the same franchise twice. Dallas held only a 1.8 percent chance at the top pick when the lottery balls dropped. It hit anyway. The Mavericks won the 2025 draft lottery, an outcome so improbable that it briefly overshadowed even the wreckage of the Dončić trade. With the top selection secured, Dallas turned to Duke and took Cooper Flagg, the most decorated amateur prospect to enter the league in years. The pick did not undo the anger of the winter before. It gave a battered fan base something to actually watch, a reason to renew a season-ticket plan that many had sworn off for good.
Talent alone does not win games. Availability does, and Dallas spent the fall discovering how little of it remained.
Kyrie Irving re-signed with Dallas on July 6. He bet his own recovery against a franchise desperate for stability at the point. The ACL he tore in March never cooperated. Dallas ruled him out for the entire season before opening night even arrived. That announcement erased the backcourt scoring the front office had built its plans around. Daniel Gafford returned a week later, re-signing on July 13, but no addition could replace the shot creation Irving had been expected to provide. Irving spent the year in a suit on the bench, mentoring a locker room instead of steering it on the floor.
Davis tried to shoulder what Irving’s absence left behind. For a stretch, he succeeded. He averaged 20.4 points, 11.1 rebounds and 2.8 assists across the 20 games he suited up for Dallas, playing at an All-NBA level whenever his body allowed it. Injuries limited him to barely a quarter of the schedule. Every game he missed widened the gap between the roster Dallas had imagined in July and the one actually taking the floor by December. His body, more than any opponent, dictated how far this team could realistically go.
Patience ran out on November 11. Dallas fired Harrison, the executive who had traded away a generational talent nine months earlier. It ended a tenure that fan protests and season-ticket cancellations had already rendered untenable. The decision landed as vindication for a fan base that had spent the better part of a year demanding it. It did not, however, hand Dallas anything resembling a finished roster. The rebuild Harrison had triggered now belonged to someone else entirely.
Michael Finley and Matt Riccardi stepped into interim leadership. They inherited a team already sinking in the standings and a summer’s worth of decisions to defend. Neither had the luxury of an offseason to reshape the roster. Both had to manage what remained of the season while the organization searched for its next permanent voice. Finley’s own history as a Mavericks great gave the moment some weight, a familiar face steadying a locker room that had lost its footing. Stability, the one thing this franchise needed most, would have to wait a while longer.
Dallas made its boldest move of the season on February 5. It caught the league off guard. The Mavericks sent Davis, D’Angelo Russell and Jaden Hardy to Washington in an eight-player, three-team trade that brought back Khris Middleton, Marvin Bagley III, Tyus Jones, AJ Johnson and future draft capital. Barely a year after acquiring Davis in the deal that cost them Dončić, Dallas had moved on from him too. It read less like continuity and more like a franchise starting over for the second time in twelve months, unwilling to wait out an injury-plagued fit that had never fully clicked.
Middleton and Jones slid into a rotation still finding its footing. Their veteran professionalism landed in a locker room that badly needed it. The draft picks acquired in the deal mattered more than any single player coming back, currency for whatever Dallas builds next. Interim leadership had chosen assets and flexibility over another aging star. It was a bet on the rebuild Dallas had backed into rather than one it had planned from the start.
Flagg did not blink at any of it. He started every game he played, averaging 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists across 70 appearances. Those numbers would have been remarkable even on a stable roster. On a team stripped down twice in one season, they were the only constant. Voters rewarded that consistency with the Rookie of the Year award and a spot on the All-Rookie First Team. The honors felt less like a consolation prize and more like the one unambiguous success of the Mavericks’ 2025-26 season. Naji Marshall added 15.2 points a night. Max Christie chipped in 12.3. P.J. Washington’s 14.2 points and 7.0 rebounds gave Flagg secondary scoring on the nights the rookie needed it most. None of that changed where the season was heading. All of it suggested where the next one might.
Elimination arrived on March 23, an overtime loss to Golden State that made official what the roster had signaled for months. Dallas finished 26-56, fourth in the Southwest Division and 12th in a crowded Western Conference. It marked a second consecutive year without the playoffs. The full ledger of the season sits in the box scores: 56 losses against a backdrop of a fired general manager, a franchise cornerstone lost to injury before he played a minute, and a former champion traded away at the same deadline that once brought him to Dallas. On January 29, in the middle of all that upheaval, Dallas paused to retire Mark Aguirre’s No. 24. It was a reminder that this franchise has weathered difficult stretches before and found its way back.
Nobody in Dallas will remember this season for its record. They will remember it as the year the roster got torn down twice. They will remember it as the year ownership finally acted on months of fan fury. Above all, they will remember it as the year a teenage forward looked like an answer to a question the franchise had been asking since February 2025. Jason Kidd’s extension in October bought him time to coach through the chaos. The real verdict on the Mavericks’ 2025-26 season will be written by what Dallas does with the assets, the picks and the rookie it still has standing. Flagg gave this fan base a reason to watch again. What the front office builds around him now will decide whether that reason was temporary or permanent.
7th February, 2017
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29th March, 2016
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September 29th, 2026 2
