Posted March 7, 2025
By Alec Marcus
What an absolute train-wreck the Dallas Mavericks are right now.
A little over a month ago, the reigning Western Conference Champions were patiently waiting for their superstar to return from injury and primed to ascend back up the ladder of title contention. But today, the Mavericks sit just one game over .500 in 10th place and will soon miss out on the Play-in Tournament.
I think we’re all tired talking about the Luka Doncic trade. Nico Harrison and Company clearly wanted to put those glory days in the past and we won’t stop them, especially after Luka and LeBron just fired off an 8-game win streak together that catapulted the Lakers into 2nd place.
But if we backtrack to this time last month, there was much more optimism surrounding the Mavericks’ camp. They still had a superstar on the perimeter and were pairing him with another superstar in the paint, they had the makeup of an elite frontcourt defense with a trio of towering centers, and they had a rotation comprised of several scoring options.
And then the smoke cleared.
Anthony Davis, Luka’s trade counterpart, suffered an adductor strain (thigh injury) in his Mavs debut and hasn’t stepped back onto the court since. With no other high-octane shot creators on the roster, a substantial burden fell onto Kyrie Irving’s shoulders, and that my friends is what we call a “recipe for disaster”.
Prior to the Doncic trade, Kyrie was averaging 24.3 points per game on stellar 48% shooting and 41.5% from 3-point range. Afterwards, his shooting efficiency dipped to 45% and he was sporting just a 35% clip from beyond the arc, with only 2 more points on his scoring average to show for it.
Yes, those dropoffs are expected when you lose your tag-team partner. However, what Harrison and Company failed to take into account (and this is becoming a very lengthy list mind you) is that Kyrie Irving as a top option was always doomed to fail.
They’ll say that Kyrie operating all by himself wasn’t the idea even though they seriously fugged the math when trading for Anthony Davis.
I will give AD his flowers; he played a career-high 76 games in the 2023-24 season and returned to his prime All-NBA/Defensive form. But no superstar outside Kawhi Leonard has had a more challenging time staying on the floor.
Since Davis’ peak 2019-20 season when he won the NBA title, he has suited up for just 36, 40, 56, and now 43 games sans that 2024 “breakout”. Nearly all of his ailments have been to his lower-half whether it be his knees, ankle, foot, or currently his adductor.
Nobody outside of that Mavericks front office believed a future with Luka was bleaker than a future with a superstar that has an ambulance driver in his Contact favorites.
It was inevitable that at some point Kyrie would have to carry the load by himself, and what a truly gut-wrenching and puzzling statement that is.
Irving hasn’t reached the 70-game mark since his last year in Cleveland, where he was entrenched as the second option during their time at the top. He played 60 and 67 game seasons during his two years in Boston, one of which he missed the entire postseason due to injury. And he played…oh it’s worse than I thought…20, 54, and 29 games in his “full” seasons in Brooklyn.
On Dallas he finished out a 60 game season in his first year, then 58 in his second year, and just when it seemed like he made headway, Irving’s third season came to a screeching halt when he tore his ACL this past Monday. He’ll finish with 50 games played, meaning that’s six consecutive years he’s played less than 61 games.
As much as Mavericks’ management would like to believe this tear was a freak incident and attribute it to more bad luck, it’s the furthest thing from it.
Kyrie Irving…*taps microphone so everyone in the crowd can hear*…indisputably cannot be the number one option on a team…ever. It has nothing to do with his skill, it has everything to do with his…ailments.
These shortened campaigns from Irving have not always been because of injury.
There was the season he was forced to miss several home games due to the New York City vaccine mandate at indoor workplaces. There was the season he missed a handful of weeks because he refused to denounce his antisemitic beliefs, leading to a team-imposed suspension.
But, most of them are due to injury…There was the season he underwent shoulder surgery right after the All-Star Break mainly because his Nets had fallen apart without Kevin Durant to save them. There was the season I mentioned earlier in which he had two procedures on his knee in March, forcing him to miss his first Celtics playoffs. And if you don’t remember, he was inactive most of December 2023 and two weeks in late January 2024.
The point is you have to be a complete degenerate (and that’s what Nico Harrison has become) to think a Kyrie Irving-Anthony Davis pairing, where Irving is the focal point, would last. I know the Mavericks were doing everything to win in this 2-3 year window winding out their primes, but the duo made it just one game together so far…one (1).
Kyrie Irving is radically unreliable, even beyond this most recent renaissance. We’ve seen it time and time again, this guy can’t stay healthy or stay out of trouble for consecutive seasons.
That ACL tear, while it wasn’t gruesome, was a direct result of not having a co-star beside him. Harrison and Co. did the math and even with Davis’ injury risk, they still liked Klay Thompson and P.J Washington as ball-handling shot creators and had supreme confidence in their supporting cast. Both of those elements were already proven false.
Nico Harrison and the Dallas Mavericks were dancing with the devil and they’re about to realize its severe consequences. In this case, the devil was the belief that a marriage with Kyrie Irving as its top star without Luka Doncic would be profitable, when it was always a colossal mistake.
Kyrie is not durable, not capable of being a leader, and has never been able to lift up a franchise all by himself. I’m having a bit of fun with the “devil” monicker because Irving was a Duke Blue Devil, but even that lasted just *nine* games because of, you guessed it, an injury.
When you’re ready to dance, go dancing with the stars instead, those dependable and unfathomable megastars instead.
That’s what the Lakers always do.
NBAL 