The Nico Harrison era is over in Dallas. There will be plenty of retrospective analysis of his time as general manager of the Mavericks, but for the organization, this move was about the future. It is an acceptance that Harrison’s vision of a championship contender featuring Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving was not going to work. The decision was made because, despite the devastating fallout of the Luka Dončić trade, the Mavericks do have hope for the future in the form of Cooper Flagg—and ownership decided Harrison was not the man to maximize the rookie’s potential.
The Mavericks will search for a long-term answer; in the meantime, the role will be filled by Michael Finley and Matt Riccardi. But there is no time to waste. They need to start making moves immediately to recognize their new reality.
The roster is not well constructed to win games or to help Flagg reach his potential. If winning is now a secondary priority to Flagg’s growth (as the Harrison dismissal suggests), the team’s personnel needs a complete overhaul.
Some fans may look at Flagg’s underwhelming stat line to begin his career and question if the Mavs should move so strongly in that direction. The No. 1 pick is putting up 15.0 points, 6.8 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game while barely shooting 40% from the floor. It has not been an easy transition to the NBA. Yet that should not dim his future outlook. He has great size for the NBA with a solid feel around the basket, his jumper looks good even if the shots aren’t going in and there’s switchability defensively. He’s struggled, but he hasn’t been put in a position to succeed. With Harrison and any attachment to his grand plan out the door, it’s time for the Mavericks to fix that.
Here’s how they do it.
Step 1: Trade Anthony Davis
This is a nonnegotiable aspect of building the team around Flagg. Davis has to go.
It’s not because of his talent. Davis is still a two-way force, but he’s struggled with health historically and has barely been on the floor during his time with the Mavericks. More problematically for Flagg’s growth, Davis dominates the area of the court Flagg should be operating. The rookie’s best position is power forward; Davis, famously, wants to play only power forward and not center. Davis also clogs up the paint thanks to his lack of shooting, which makes Flagg’s life harder while he works to progress his jumper to an NBA level. It’s certainly useful having Davis around to show Flagg the work that goes into being an NBA superstar and teach him good habits, especially defensively. But insofar as allowing Flagg to stretch his wings and really push his boundaries to see what he can do at this level, Davis’s presence hinders more than helps.
Above all that, though, Davis just doesn’t make sense for the team anymore. He’s a win-now player and the Mavericks, through no fault of Davis, are not going to win now. He also has the highest trade value of any player on the roster by a vast margin. At the very least, the Mavericks have to look into what he might fetch as far as a return.
Ideally the Mavs target backcourt talent that can take the ballhandling responsibility off Flagg’s shoulders and allow him to play off the ball, which is much easier for rookies acclimating to the NBA. Even just landing a shooter or two would create more space for Flagg to work with.
In the bigger picture, the Mavs really need to restock the draft pick cabinet. They own their own pick in 2026, but after that? Dallas doesn’t own the rights to its own first-rounder until ’31. It’s going to be mighty difficult to put a good team around Flagg without any draft picks. Trading Davis is the quickest, easiest way to address the issue.
They won’t get what many would consider optimal value for Davis, and they certainly will not make up for the Dončić trade. Davis’s value isn’t particularly high at the moment, and if everybody in the league expects them to seek out trade opportunities, it doesn’t constitute great leverage. Moving Davis would open up the floor for Flagg, give Flagg more opportunities to play his natural position and garner assets (of varying quality) to ensure Flagg has the supporting cast necessary to thrive.
Step 2: Further clear up the logjam in the frontcourt
Part of the reason Harrison was fired (yes, there are reasons beyond the Dončić trade) is the imbalance of the roster. Of the players who rank top-10 in minutes played, seven (including Flagg and Davis) are frontcourt players in some capacity. You can quibble with Klay Thompson being listed as a small forward, but he’s too slow to defend most guards at this stage in his career. The Mavericks trot out huge lineups regularly that are heavy on defense and rebounding but short on shooting and perimeter creation.
Trading Davis would help alleviate the issue, but more moves are needed. Other players who overlap positionally with Flagg are P.J. Washington, Naji Marshall, Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively II. The last two are centers but spend time at power forward when another center is on the court. Trading one or two for more traditional backcourt options would allow Flagg to play full time at power forward and ensure most of his minutes are spent alongside only one frontcourt player.
Marshall and Gafford seem like quality candidates to be moved. They have value to other teams in their respective roles. The type of trade Dallas should be searching for would look like sending Gafford to the Celtics for a package including Sam Hauser—filling another team’s big man need in exchange for a player who fits right alongside Flagg both now and in the future.
A frontcourt featuring Flagg, Washington, Thompson, Marshall, Gafford and Lively is awfully crowded. A frontcourt of Flagg, Washington, Thompson and Lively makes a lot more sense. It would naturally create a lot more room for Flagg to work and balance the floor overall. Dallas must be careful to not give away talent for nothing, but if this season is about Flagg, then clearing up the mess of players who occupy similar places on the floor is a must.
Step 3: Check in on Kyrie Irving
The Irving situation will be an interesting one to puzzle out for whoever ends up in charge of the front office.
On the one hand, Irving has been great in Dallas since his time with the Nets came to an ugly end. He accepted his role as a No. 2 option behind a heliocentric star and kept his off-court controversies to a minimum. He appeared to build a great relationship with Dončić and seems like a valued mentor of the Mavs’ younger players. Like Davis, Irving is a win-now player but having a star guard on the team to help Flagg is a lot more useful than a fellow star forward. A case can easily be made that the Mavs are better off with Irving in the fold in terms of Flagg’s development, and the front office may not be eager to ship off yet another star, especially if Davis is on the move.
On the other hand, Irving did not sign up for a rebuild around a talented rookie. He was brought to Dallas to elevate the franchise to contention, and he did. Then he became a central part of Harrison’s post-Dončić plan. Now everything is up in the air. Would Irving be happy spending his final good years helping Flagg along? If not, that could become a problem very quickly. The Nets, Celtics and Cavaliers can all attest to the unpleasantness that occurs if Irving is not pleased with his current situation. Regardless, Dallas has to consider trading Irving for the same reason Davis might be on the move—Irving is a talented veteran who could be traded for a quality package.
Nothing will happen right now because Irving is recovering from a torn ACL and it doesn’t seem he’ll be back anytime soon. But it would behoove the franchise to check in and see what he thinks of it all. Because if he wants out, they’re much better off knowing that now than being surprised with the knowledge come offseason.
Step 4: Politely ask Jason Kidd to knock it off with the Point Flagg experiment
This step is contingent upon Step 2 being executed. Assuming the Mavericks clear out some frontcourt minutes for Flagg and get ballhandlers in return, Kidd needs to relax with playing Flagg at point guard.
The decision to have Flagg start at the one to begin his rookie season was borne partly out of necessity. Without Irving, the Mavs have only Russell to handle the ball and he isn’t really a true point anyway. Instead Kidd tossed Flagg into the deep end of the NBA life by having him play out of position and learn how to run an offense without a history of doing so. The results have not been great. Which is expected, even if it is also a large part of the reason Dallas is struggling to win.
A trial by fire has its benefits and Kidd in particular has proof of concept. He did the same thing with Giannis Antetokounmpo to great success. But there is one glaring difference between Antetokounmpo’s situation and Flagg’s that needs more recognition: Kidd didn’t do this to Antetokounmpo as a rookie. He put the Greek Freak at the point in his second NBA season.
Flagg is juggling a lot. Maybe he can handle it, but right now he’s obviously having a tough time. Clearing out the roster for Flagg only to take the ball out of his hands may seem at odds with the plan at large. However, the Mavericks didn’t really have a choice to play him at point guard. Without the constraints of Harrison’s expectations and plans for the roster, the Mavericks can let Flagg thrive at what he’s good at already and slowly work on the weak parts of his game—a more standard development plan for a rookie.
Step 5: Let the chips fall where they may and pray for more lottery luck
The above moves, without a doubt, make the Mavericks worse. They are already bad. But the chances of them moving several rotation pieces and, potentially, high-end talent in exchange for winning players is miniscule. As it stands, the 2026 first-round pick represents the team’s best hope at landing another lottery-caliber talent next to Flagg.
Should the Mavericks lose a ton of games while Flagg finds his NBA footing, it’ll lead to a juicy draft pick in a very talented 2026 draft. If Flagg shows out in the vacuum created by the above trades and the Mavs end up winning more than 30 games, then they’ll still have a decent pick and a lot more reason to believe Flagg is a championship cornerstone. There isn’t really a bad outcome, and Dallas knows lottery luck can strike at any time.
The stink of the Harrison era will linger in Dallas for years to come. His firing represents an opportunity for the franchise to do what is best for the long term: Put Flagg in a position to succeed. The above blueprint is only one of several ways the Mavs can go about it.
More NBA on Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s NBA podcast, Open Floor, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the Mavericks Can Rebuild Around Cooper Flagg After Nico Harrison’s Firing.
