The Dallas Mavericks spent most of the 2025-26 season looking like a team that forgot how to function. Injuries piled up. Kyrie Irving missed the whole year. The supporting cast kept coming up short. And yet somehow, the franchise ended up with something that might actually change everything: Cooper Flagg.
Flagg was supposed to be a dream. He showed up and immediately looked like the real deal. He scored. He passed. He guarded everyone. The kid looked like a franchise savior. But here’s the thing. Even Flagg can’t do it alone. And right now, the roster around him is filled with question marks.
That brings us to the 2026 NBA Draft. The Mavericks hold the No. 9 pick. In a normal year, you sit there and grab the best player left on the board. But this isn’t a normal year. This is the year Dallas needs to build an actual supporting cast around a 19-year-old superstar. And that might mean doing something surprising on draft night.
The smartest move might be trading down. Seriously. The Mavericks could call up the Oklahoma City Thunder or Indiana Pacers, both of whom have multiple first-round picks to play with. Say Dallas sends No. 9 to OKC and gets back No. 12 and No. 17. Suddenly they’ve got two cracks at adding real depth instead of one.
That kind of flexibility matters because this roster has holes everywhere. The Mavericks need shooting in the worst way. Opposing defenses packed the paint all season long, daring anyone not named Flagg to hit a three. Most of the time, they were right to do it. The offense bogged down. Driving lanes vanished. It was ugly.
Adding a perimeter shooter like Christian Anderson with one pick and grabbing an athletic rim protector with the other would address two massive needs at once. Anderson’s gravity would open up space for Flagg to operate. A mobile big would help a frontcourt that got bullied for long stretches. That’s how you build a real team. Stars plus specialists who fit around them.
The Knicks just proved this formula works. They won the 2026 title with a deep, balanced rotation. The Spurs made the Finals the same way. Dallas watched that happen while their own bench struggled to produce reliable minutes. Trading down gives them a chance to fix that problem in one night instead of hoping a single prospect covers all the weaknesses.
There’s also the financial side. Rookie contracts are cheap. The more cost-controlled talent Dallas can add now, the more room they’ll have down the road to make moves in free agency or pull off trades. It’s smart team building. Not flashy. But smart.
Flagg is the kind of player teams spend years chasing. Now that the Mavericks have him, the front office can’t afford to waste the opportunity. Sitting at No. 9 and taking one player might work. But turning that pick into multiple pieces that actually fit around their young star feels like the right bet. The future runs through Cooper Flagg. The Mavs just need to make sure he has people to run with.
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