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Team Profile
Dallas Mavericks: Five things you need to know
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Kyrie Irving, born in Melbourne, has not played since March 2025 – and Dallas is still waiting.
- Kyrie Irving was born in Melbourne and is contracted to Dallas through 2028.
- Cooper Flagg won Rookie of the Year averaging 21.0 points as a 19-year-old.
- Dallas finished 26-56 and missed the playoffs in Flagg's first season.
Kyrie Irving has not played an NBA game since March 2025.
The Melbourne-born guard is the highest-paid Australian-born player in the league, on a deal worth USD $118.47M that runs to a player option in 2028. He spent all of last season rehabilitating a reconstructed left ACL while the Dallas Mavericks came apart around him – 26 wins, no playoffs, and a 19-year-old rookie carrying the franchise alone.
That rookie, Cooper Flagg, was the best first-year player in basketball. Dallas still finished 12th in the West.
It fits a franchise that does nothing gradually. On 2 February 2025 the Mavericks traded Luka Dončić to acquire Anthony Davis. On 4 February 2026, two days past the anniversary, they traded Davis away. In between, they won a draft lottery and found a Rookie of the Year.
Australians who have played for the Dallas Mavericks
Three Australians have worn a Mavericks uniform.
Kyrie Irving is the most decorated athlete born in Australia to play in the NBA. Born in Melbourne on 23 March 1992 while his father played in Australia, Irving returned to the United States as a child and was drafted first overall by Cleveland in 2011, winning the 2016 championship there. He arrived in Dallas in 2023 and was central to the run to the 2024 NBA Finals. His guaranteed money – USD $118.47M across a three-year deal with a player option in 2028 – is the largest of any Australian-born player in the league.
Danté Exum spent two and a half seasons in Dallas from 2023 until February 2026, the most productive stretch of an NBA career that began when Utah took him fifth overall in 2014. The Melbourne guard was a rotation piece on the 2024 Finals team. He was included in the Anthony Davis trade to Washington on 4 February 2026 while sidelined by knee surgery, and the Wizards waived him soon after. He is now an unrestricted free agent.
Ryan Broekhoff signed a two-year deal with Dallas in August 2018 after a long route through Europe from Frankston, Victoria. A specialist shooter, he scored a career-high 17 points for the Mavericks in 2019.
2026-27 team snapshot
Dallas enters the new season under new management, with the reigning Rookie of the Year and a star trying to come back.
The Mavericks finished 2025-26 at 26-56, 12th in the Western Conference, missing the play-in on a season-series tiebreaker with New Orleans despite identical records. It was their worst season since 2017-18.
The reason to watch was Cooper Flagg. Taken first overall in June 2025 after Dallas won the lottery, the 19-year-old forward started all 70 games he played, averaging 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists, and was named Kia NBA Rookie of the Year in April 2026.
The season's defining move came in February. Twelve months after trading Luka Dončić to acquire Anthony Davis, Dallas traded Davis away – sending him, Danté Exum, Jaden Hardy and D'Angelo Russell to Washington in a three-team deal that returned Khris Middleton, AJ Johnson and Marvin Bagley III. Two franchise-defining stars left in consecutive Februaries.
Then, on 4 May 2026, the Mavericks hired Masai Ujiri as president of basketball operations and alternate governor. The architect of Toronto's 2019 championship has moved quickly.
Dallas acquired Santi Aldama from Memphis and Marcus Sasser from Detroit on 8 July as part of a six-team trade, signed Tarik Biberović, and added rookies Sergio De Larrea, Morez Johnson Jr. and two-way forward Tobi Lawal. Middleton left after five months in a sign-and-trade with Washington and Marvin Bagley III signed with Denver.
The roster that results is deeper and more experienced than the 26-win record suggests: Flagg and Irving alongside Klay Thompson, P.J. Washington, Daniel Gafford, Dereck Lively II, Naji Marshall, Max Christie and Caleb Martin. The question is not talent. It is whether Irving's knee holds.
Why the Mavericks matter
Dallas is the NBA franchise that keeps making decisions nobody else would make.
They traded for a European teenager nobody in the building had seen play in person and got Dirk Nowitzki. They gave an internet billionaire the keys and got two decades of the loudest ownership in American sport. They drafted Luka Dončić and reached a Finals, then traded him at 25, in his prime, in the middle of the night, for a 31-year-old.
Nowhere else generates that volume of franchise-altering swings. It is why the Mavericks are never boring, and why their history reads as a series of gambles rather than a steady climb.
Dirk Nowitzki changed everything
The Mavericks spent the 1990s as one of the worst teams in professional sport.
Then, on draft night in 1998, Dallas acquired the rights to a 20-year-old German forward taken ninth overall by Milwaukee. Almost nobody projected what followed.
Dirk Nowitzki spent 21 seasons with the Mavericks, all of them with one franchise, and redefined what a seven-foot player could be. A career 38 per cent three-point shooter with a one-legged fadeaway nobody has successfully copied, he was named MVP in 2007 and finished as the highest-scoring international player in NBA history.
He is the reason the franchise has a banner.
2011: the championship
The 2011 title is the great outlier in modern NBA history.
Dallas entered the playoffs as the third seed, swept the two-time defending champion Lakers, beat Oklahoma City in five, and met a Miami side that had just assembled LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and been installed as overwhelming favourites.
The Mavericks won in six. Nowitzki, playing through a torn tendon in his left hand and a fever that kept him out of Game 4's second half warm-up, was named Finals MVP.
For a franchise that had lost the 2006 Finals to the same opponent after leading 2-0, it was a five-year debt collected in full.
The Luka era, and how it ended
Dallas acquired Luka Dončić on draft night in 2018, trading the rights to Trae Young and a future first-round pick to the Atlanta Hawks.
Both players became All-Stars. Dončić became something more – a five-time All-NBA First Team selection who dragged the Mavericks to the Western Conference Finals in 2022 and the NBA Finals in 2024, where Boston beat them in five.
Then, in February 2025, Dallas traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis.
There is no modern precedent for a franchise trading a 25-year-old superstar coming off a Finals appearance. The reaction in Dallas was severe, and it has not fully subsided.
The greatest Mavericks of all time
Dirk Nowitzki is the franchise's leading scorer, its only MVP and its only championship centrepiece. Luka Dončić produced the highest peak of anyone who has worn the uniform. Rolando Blackman and Mark Aguirre built the competitive 1980s teams that first made Dallas relevant, with Derek Harper running the point.
Steve Nash developed alongside Nowitzki before winning two MVPs elsewhere, Jason Kidd returned to captain the 2011 champions, and Jason Terry came off the bench to score 27 in the Finals clincher.
Five Fast Facts
- The Mavericks have won one NBA championship, in 2011, beating a Miami side favoured to win multiple titles.
- Dirk Nowitzki played all 21 of his NBA seasons with Dallas, the longest single-franchise career in league history at the time of his retirement.
- Kyrie Irving was born in Melbourne and is the highest-paid Australian-born player in the NBA.
- Dallas won the 2025 draft lottery and selected Cooper Flagg first overall.
- Three Australians have played for the franchise: Irving, Danté Exum and Ryan Broekhoff.
Historical Timeline
- 1980: Franchise founded as an NBA expansion team, the youngest in Texas.
- 1988: Reach the Western Conference Finals, losing to the Lakers in seven games.
- 1998: Acquire the draft rights to Dirk Nowitzki.
- 2000: Mark Cuban buys the franchise.
- 2006: First NBA Finals appearance, losing to Miami after leading 2-0.
- 2007: Nowitzki named MVP; Dallas wins 67 games and loses in the first round to eighth-seeded Golden State.
- 2011: Beat Miami 4-2 to win the championship, Nowitzki named Finals MVP.
- 2018: Acquire Luka Dončić on draft night in a trade with Atlanta.
- 2018: Ryan Broekhoff signs a two-year deal.
- 2023: Kyrie Irving and Danté Exum arrive.
- 2024: Reach the NBA Finals, losing to Boston.
- 2025: Dončić traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis; Dallas wins the lottery and drafts Cooper Flagg.
- 2026: Davis and Exum traded to Washington on 4 February; Flagg named Rookie of the Year as Dallas finishes 26-56.
Looking ahead
The Mavericks have the reigning Rookie of the Year, a former No.1 pick added in Risacher, and a Melbourne-born All-Star who has not played in 18 months. That last piece decides the season. Irving turns 35 during 2026-27 and is returning from an ACL reconstruction at an age where those returns are rarely complete.
If he comes back close to himself, Dallas has a fast track from 26 wins to relevance. If he does not, this is Cooper Flagg's team and Cooper Flagg's rebuild.
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