Mavericks have little to offer Cooper Flagg but growing pains. Jason Kidd can relate

In 1994, the Mavericks secured the services of Jason Kidd with the second pick of the draft because they were really bad. Last summer, the Mavericks landed Cooper Flagg with the first pick because they were really lucky.

But are they now headed into the land of the really bad?

It’s all been a lot to process for Mavericks fans in less than a 12-month span. Their team was building a champion around Luka Doncic, having been to the conference finals twice and the NBA Finals once in 2022 and 2024, when all of a sudden they became a team building a champion around Anthony Davis.

If that looked to anyone like a sensible plan, it lasted all of three quarters before Davis went down with an injury in his first game for Dallas that would cost him another six weeks. Since then — with a little change near the top of the management flow chart — the Mavericks have become a team interested in building a future around Flagg. It’s not going to replace Luka in some minds, maybe for years, but it’s a far more reasonable approach that just got derailed — again — by an injury to Davis.

Mavericks

I thought the chances of trading him before the deadline in three weeks took a mighty hit when Davis suffered ligament damage in his left hand last weekend. Kidd said he thought there might be some news on Davis later this week, adding after his pregame news conference Monday that he would probably read about it on Twitter before he found out himself. Sure enough, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Tuesday that Davis will likely undergo surgery and be out several months. Hours later, Charania reported that Davis, in fact, will NOT have surgery and be re-evaluated in six weeks.

Somehow, that does not completely destroy his trade value. We are in an NBA era in which trades are almost never talent-for-talent swaps. They are contracts-for-contracts deals. The Washington Wizards recently acquired four-time All-Star Trae Young, not because he can help them get into the playoffs but because his contract can help them down the line. They may not even suit him up when he’s healthy (see Kyrie Irving here for more information).

The Mavericks won a game Monday night without Davis, which is a rare thing and one that leads only to a muted celebration. They are 5-15 without Davis this season, a .500 team with him. Winning a home game against Brooklyn is not the most difficult task in this year’s NBA, and back-to-back home games against Utah later this week pose another interesting challenge with the visitors trying to tank harder than just about anyone in this league. The Jazz recently lost a home game to the Charlotte Hornets.

By 55 points.

All of this leads to what Flagg is enduring in his rookie season after a Final Four trip to Duke and a childhood in Maine where losing basketball games was as much of a threat as heat stroke. Remember when Flagg said back in November he had never lost six games before?

Dallas is 15-25 with the season’s halfway mark coming Wednesday night against the Denver Nuggets. They are 2 1/2 games out of the play-in games, a feature the league hoped would curb tanking but has led teams to work even harder to make sure they are losing in Washington, in Utah, in New Orleans and elsewhere.

The Mavericks, with Irving and Davis taking up a monstrous amount of cap dollars while not playing basketball, don’t really need to even work at tanking in order to protect what could be their last lottery pick for several years, the others having been jettisoned by the aforementioned recently departed management figure.

If the Mavericks are going to mostly stink in Flagg’s rookie season and perhaps not get much better right away next year, is this stunting his NBA growth in any way? He just turned 19. There’s no reason he doesn’t have at least 15 good and sometimes great years of basketball ahead of him, so I don’t know that fans need to get overly worried about him starting on the wrong foot here.

The Mavs won 36 games in Kidd’s rookie season and only 26 the next before he got traded to Phoenix in his third year. He understands Flagg is dealing with adversity, having gone through it himself. “I think when you look at learning how to win, you have to be around vets, and we’re talking a long time ago. The league was a lot older,’’ Kidd said.

“And so learning how to win those games with Jamal [Mashburn] and Jimmy [Jackson], we would be up in the last six minutes and we found ourselves with a loss because we didn’t know it wasn’t just talent. The NBA game doesn’t start until six minutes [left]. We didn’t understand that and the vets did, so they took advantage of our lack of knowledge at that point. We lost a lot of games when I was here and we didn’t get to see it through because there was an ownership change.

“Business sometimes gets in the way.’’

Kidd developed enough to lead New Jersey to the NBA Finals and to start for Dallas’ only championship team. And no fan base understands that point about business getting in the way like the Mavs.

Still trying to recover their senses not quite a year since the trade. Now it’s enough to enjoy those nights where Flagg – not quite alone but fully in charge against a lowly team like Brooklyn — can produce 27 points, five rebounds and five assists, enough for the win. And a glimpse of a bright future that has been delayed once more by Anthony Davis not in uniform.

X: @TimCowlishaw

Mavericks’ Anthony Davis will not require surgery on injured left hand