Mavs Were Given A Reboot – Don't Waste It.
By winning the rights to Cooper Flagg, Dallas has chance to rethink everything. Again.
It’s still pretty difficult to fully process the 2025 the Mavericks are having. They’ve experienced what is pretty clearly the most damaging moment of self-destruction in franchise history—and then, a few months later (100 days, to be exact), they fell backward into the biggest personnel win the franchise has ever seen.
It would be like losing your house to a tornado, only to discover, while rebuilding, a massive ancient buried treasure beneath your property that suddenly makes you absurdly rich. Or something like that.
But it happened. All of it.
Just 365 days ago, I was writing about the 2024 NBA Finals that were about to begin. I wrote an enjoyable piece on Luka Doncic and another on Jason Kidd. The present was unthinkable and the future was bright and exciting.
But, since then, everything is different. They have managed to drive away some of their biggest loyalists and that group seems determined to remain in their alienated position. They are seemingly upset that the team lucked into the lottery because then there is no future failure promised or reckoning assured. It all remains very bizarre. Aside from franchises actually leaving their cities forever (Colts sneak away from Baltimore and Browns escaping Cleveland), I am hard pressed to find a fanbase that has been so nuked mentally.
They say nothing heals better than winning. I believe that to be true. People want sports to provide smiles and something to be proud of, and despite every attempt to drive fans away, we know that winning is the cure for every sports disease. It might not be everyone, but if they win in this next generation, almost everyone will come back (or be replaced by someone else).
That’s just the way it is. Sports is not a place where people hold lifelong grudges—if you win enough.
But let’s put that aside for now. The story of the angry fanbase is interesting, but I have no answers on how to move forward—especially if the franchise is dead set on not firing those involved. There are many, many moving parts all going at once, and so far, we can barely get a single clear thought from any of them—aside from the fact that Rick Welts is here to get a new arena built, and he makes that abundantly clear every time he speaks.
What I want to talk about today is the prevailing discussions in Mavs land these days about how to best move forward. The Athletic recently discussed the wisdom of the “two-timeline approach” which is a Golden State thing and given Welts involvement in everything these days, there is a real likelihood that he has been throwing this around both to the writer of this story, Christian Clark, and more notably, the minds inside Mavericks headquarters at the head of the table.