The Dallas Mavericks Risked It All—and It Almost Worked

Luka Doncic, drenched in sweat and despair, his hair matted, his face flush, his neck wrapped in a towel, settled in for his final postgame interview of the 2023-24 season about an hour before midnight on Monday. In the back of the room, a blizzard of green-and-white confetti filled the entirety of a massive TV screen. The Celtics’ championship celebration had barely begun when the Dallas Mavericks’ star fielded his first question.

That’s the thing about being ahead of schedule, on the court or at the podium: It can get uncomfortable rather quickly.

“Nothing,” Doncic said when asked what he was feeling, his voice so low and monotone that the microphone barely picked it up. “Sad we lost. No specific.”

A thrilling, and wholly surprising, run to the NBA Finals had ended with a wholly lopsided 106-88 defeat in Game 5, and a 4-1 loss in the series. Doncic had been dominant at times, but not often enough. Kyrie Irving had been occasionally brilliant, just not in any of the games in Boston (all losses). The Celtics were simply deeper, more talented, more seasoned—and ultimately overwhelming for a young, recently assembled Mavericks team that at one point wasn’t even a sure bet to make the playoffs.

“They’re a great team,” Doncic said, while the TV showed commissioner Adam Silver presenting the trophy to the Celtics. “They have been together for a long time, and they had to go through everything. So we just got to look at them, see how they play, maturity, and they have some great players. We can learn from that.”

Monday’s finale mirrored the Mavericks’ other losses in the series. Doncic scored 28 points, but had to work hard for all of them, and his prodigious playmaking skills were held in check (five assists). Irving put up a meek 15 points (on 16 shots) amid another night of boos and derisive chants in the arena he once called home. And no one wearing a Mavericks uniform could do much of anything to contain Jayson Tatum (31 points, 11 assists) or Finals MVP Jaylen Brown (21 points).

The Mavericks entered the Finals with pundits proclaiming Doncic and Irving as an all-time great backcourt. The Celtics, with all their length and versatility, made a mockery of those assertions.

For the 25-year-old Doncic, it was a stinging failure on the NBA’s grandest stage, concluding a series in which his defense and his composure came under intense scrutiny. His clipped answers and low tones conveyed everything. For the 32-year-old Irving, who has won (once) and lost (three times) on this stage before, it was another moment to learn and reflect.

“Success can be new for a lot of people, too,” he said, “but when you fail at the Finals, it’s not something that you want to carry the disappointment forever, or on to next season. We worked extremely hard to be one of the final two teams. We didn’t achieve our goal, but we achieved most of our goal. So, this is just the last step that we have to get back to, and we know it’s not going to be easy.”

It was up to Irving to provide the perspective: that the Mavericks were a fifth seed, a team that beat three higher seeds to get here, a team that added two new starters just four months ago, a team filled with youth and promise. They lost to a Celtics team that had already gone through these evolutionary stages, that had already lost a championship two years ago, endured its pain, learned its lessons, made its adjustments.

So in defeat, Irving made a pitch for justifiable optimism: “I see an opportunity for us to really build our future in a positive manner,” he said, “where this is almost like a regular thing for us, and we’re competing for championships.”

Indeed, this Mavericks run feels more like a beginning than an end, a testament to steady team building and risk taking, with a payoff yet to come.

The thing is, the Mavericks never expected to be here. Or at least, the Maverick who signs all the checks, never expected his team would be here. Not this soon.

“No,” Mark Cuban, the franchise’s longtime owner (now a minority partner) told The Ringer earlier in the series, “I did not.”

Sure, the Mavs had finished the season strong after making deadline deals for Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington. They’d become one of the league’s better defensive teams, after spending months as one of the worst. They had an electrifying backcourt that they all believed could lead them to the Finals … eventually. But the Mavericks overall were too young, too unproven to expect a run this season, especially given the strength of the Western Conference.

The Los Angeles Clippers had more experience. The top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder had more overall talent. The Minnesota Timberwolves had more size and continuity. The fifth-seeded Mavericks ran through them all, in that order, without the benefit of home-court advantage in any series.

But even Cuban didn’t think a Finals run was possible until, oh, 19 days before the Finals were set to begin. “When we beat Oklahoma City,” he said, referring to the Mavs’ second-round victory over the Thunder, which they clinched with a one-point win in Game 6 on May 18.

“They were the no. 1 team in the Western Conference,” he said. “They had Chet [Holmgren], so they could go five out. They had Shai [Gilgeous-Alexander], who’s second in the MVP [voting]. They really didn’t have weaknesses. They’re a great defensive team, athletic as hell. And so everybody had to contribute.”

With every round, the Mavericks gained credibility and confidence. Young standouts like Dereck Lively II didn’t seem so young anymore. The guys with little (or no) playoff experience didn’t look so inexperienced any longer. They all looked polished, ready, like they belonged here.

And to the Mavericks’ leadership, it looked like the exhilarating payoff to three massive bets made in a 20-month stretch, reshaping their direction and identity. All three were objectively risky—“One hundred percent,” Cuban agreed. If any one of them had backfired, the Mavs wouldn’t have made it here.

In June 2021, Cuban simultaneously hired Nico Harrison as general manager and Jason Kidd as head coach. Harrison, a longtime Nike executive, had zero experience running an NBA team. Kidd had ample experience, but his stints in Milwaukee and Brooklyn had both ended badly. It’s possible no other team would have considered either of them.

Then came the biggest swing of all. On Feb. 6, 2023, Harrison swung a deal for Irving, who had soured on the Brooklyn Nets and was demanding a divorce. At the time, Irving was considered radioactive, a chaos agent who had repeatedly derailed the Nets with off-court distractions, including the promotion of an antisemitic film and an anti-vaccine stance that rendered him ineligible for home games during the height of the COVID pandemic.

“I wouldn’t trade our 15th guy for [Irving],” a team executive told me in November 2022. “That guy is as toxic as they get.”

But the Mavericks saw an opportunity—and pounced. They sent two starters, Dorian Finney-Smith and Spencer Dinwiddie, plus draft picks, to the Nets for Irving, because they believed he could be the costar Doncic needed. Rival teams and pundits scoffed. Yeah, good luck with that.

Few other teams even made a serious bid for Irving, believing the risk far outweighed any potential reward. But then, no other teams were eager to hire Kidd as head coach, no other teams were jumping to hire Harrison as a potential GM, either.

“For sure, for sure, they were risks,” Cuban said of Harrison, Kidd, and Irving. “I mean, there were a lot of people who just like rolled their eyes at me. But each of them brought a unique set of skills to the table that I didn’t have, that the organization hadn’t had, and I thought were valuable and important.”

The through line in all those moves? “I’m arrogantly confident,” Cuban said with a laugh. “I knew them. I didn’t know Nico, but everybody said amazing things about him. And I knew what Nico was good at, I wasn’t good at, and vice versa. Nico had relationships. He worked his way up the corporate ladder. He knew how to manage people. He knew how to deal with processes. He understood basketball and knew basketball players. But what he didn’t know in terms of running a team, I did.”

Cuban did know Kidd, from Kidd’s days running point for the Dirk Nowitzki–era Mavericks, peaking with the 2011 championship. And Kidd and Harrison knew Irving.

“Of course there was risk,” Harrison told The Ringer earlier in the Finals. “There’s no doubt about it. But I knew Kyrie, I knew how talented he was. And I just believe you take a guy like Kyrie, who I know is a hard worker. I know his character. You put him in a good environment, he’s gonna thrive. So yeah, there was risk, but I believed in the core of who Kyrie was.”

When Harrison took the job in 2021, his belief was that Doncic was ready to contend immediately. Which meant he needed a worthy costar immediately. Irving wasn’t necessarily the only option, or by any means the safest, but he was the first the Mavericks could get.

“To me the risk was to not do it,” Harrison said.

The midseason trades this year for Gafford and Washington carried less risk, but also less assurance of success. Multiple rivals and media outlets (including this one) panned the deals. The Mavericks were vindicated on every count.

“There’s so much luck involved,” Cuban said, “that if you’re waiting on luck, you have to be very, very, very patient. And we knew we had a generational talent in Luka, and I just didn’t see a path for us just to be patient.”

Cuban has a long history of making risky bets and living with the results. He’d barely taken control of the Mavericks in 2000 when he signed Dennis Rodman, who by then was more circus act than athlete. He waived him a month later, after Dallas went 3-9. In 2004, Cuban let Steve Nash walk away as a free agent, because of health concerns. Nash went to Phoenix and became a two-time MVP. In 2011, Cuban opted to break up his title team, out of concerns over age and a new labor deal. But the risk-taking goes back even further, to a failed powdered-milk venture in the early ’80s, Cuban’s first business foray after college.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fuck up,” Cuban once said on a podcast. “You only gotta be right once. Then everybody tells you how lucky you are.”

And yes, there was some odd luck involved here, too. As it turned out, Irving and Doncic, both ball-dominant stars, did not mesh quickly. Dallas went 8-18 after the trade last year, and 5-11 when both played. All that losing knocked the Mavericks down the standings. And rather than make a push for a play-in bid, they let go entirely, tanking the last game of the season, which allowed them to keep their draft pick, which in turn allowed them to draft Lively, who simply became one of their most important players this season.

The last night of the Finals is always painful for the losing team. There’s no avoiding the confetti, or hearing the raucous party going on down the hall, sometimes while they’re still doing interviews to explain how it all went wrong. After Doncic left the podium, two workers hurriedly turned off the TV with the feed of the Celtics’ celebration.

But the Mavericks left TD Garden with a sense of earned optimism. Doncic is already a perennial MVP candidate, with plenty of room still to grow. Irving has found a peace and perspective in Dallas that he seemed to lack in past stops. Lively is just 20 years old, and bursting with potential. Washington and Gafford are only 25. Team officials have high hopes for Jaden Hardy (21), Josh Green (23), and Olivier-Maxence Prosper (21). Their only significant free agent this summer is Derrick Jones Jr.

But the Mavericks understand the landscape. The Western Conference isn’t getting any easier. The Timberwolves and Thunder are young and improving, too, and the Nuggets will surely rebound from their failed title defense. Making another Finals run could require another evolutionary leap from Doncic, or the rapid development of all those recent draft picks—or maybe another swing-for-the-fences gambit in the trade market.

“The pressure’s gonna be on us now,” Cuban said, “because the expectation is gonna be a whole lot higher. They’re gonna be coming at us. And that’s not a bad thing. That’ll make us better.”