A no. 1 overall draft pick is the most valuable commodity in the NBA. By and large, it’s a direction-setting, floor-and-ceiling-raising crown jewel that, every year, convinces multiple teams to spend a few months humiliating themselves for the slight chance of winning it.
Not every draft class is the same, and not every top pick is a groundbreaking talent. But by just about any measure, Cooper Flagg is worth the self-debasement several NBA organizations put themselves through this season. Only 18 years old, coming off a season at Duke in which he became just the fourth freshman in NCAA history to win the Naismith Trophy (joining Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, and Zion Williamson), Flagg is exactly what every franchise wants. He’s a 6-foot-9, athletic, weakness-free competitor who can shoot, defend, and read the floor. His skill set is a hand-in-glove fit for today’s league, and the two NBA players he recently compared himself to—Jayson Tatum (on offense) and Jonathan Isaac (on defense)—make him a beau ideal of a franchise stanchion.
Staring at the 1.8 percent odds they had to jump up and get him, on Monday night, the Dallas Mavericks miraculously won the lottery. For Nico Harrison, the same man who just traded Luka Doncic a few months after he watched the 25-year-old perennial MVP candidate lead Dallas to the NBA Finals, Flagg is a lifeline. He’s a professional security blanket. He’s everything the most pitiful organization in the league was so desperate for in the aftermath of an all-time catastrophic transaction that still, all these months later, somehow looks even worse than it did on the day it happened.
It’s an unusual spot for a prospect like Flagg to land. The Mavericks aren’t at the bottom of a rebuild and are theoretically constructed to win big sooner rather than later. That fact shouldn’t change their calculus here, though. (Please, Nico, do not execute two galaxy-brain decisions in one calendar year.) After trading Doncic, the Mavericks were destabilized by several significant injuries up and down their roster, highlighted by extended absences from their two All-Stars. Davis strained his groin in his Dallas debut and missed the next 18 games. Kyrie Irving tore his ACL in a game against the Sacramento Kings on March 3. Dallas was eventually eliminated from the play-in tournament as several questions surrounded its ability to put a winning product on the floor, with an aging roster and few paths to improve internally or from the outside.
But now, suddenly, the Mavericks have a future that’s worth a damn. Suddenly, they’re able to build around an inevitable All-Star who is neither injury-prone nor in his early 30s. Suddenly, there’s hope and joy and reason to believe that everything will be OK. The basketball gods smiled on Harrison’s stupidity. It makes no sense, but that’s life when you leave the fortunes of several multibillion-dollar organizations at the mercy of numbered ping-pong balls.
Instead of sitting atop a sinking ship, the Mavericks can now stretch their legs on a life raft that floated in from the horizon. With Flagg, time is on their side, and, with a little health-related luck, they just might be a respectable playoff team as early as next season. A rotation of Davis, Klay Thompson, Naji Marshall, Dereck Lively II, Daniel Gafford, Caleb Martin, Max Christie, P.J. Washington, and Flagg is painfully short on shot creation but heavy on size. So much of the Mavs’ outlook hinges on Irving’s rehab and recovery timeline and an unresolved $43.9 million player option.
Harrison can move some of those pieces around to find a little more ballhandling, though. Washington and Gafford, in particular, can be included in trade talks. The Mavericks also have two future first-round picks and four pick swaps to play with this summer. If Flagg pops right away, Irving returns sometime late in the season, and AD stays healthy, Dallas could be pretty good. The front office could also go the other way and start making decisions that are in Flagg’s best interest. That means trading Davis for a whole bunch of stuff, being bad in 2025-26, and drafting another blue-chip prospect. Both paths make sense.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is punting out of the Flagg era before it starts. As the NBA’s silly season quickly approaches, in a new world where sensibility has been stained by Harrison’s incompetence and shock value no longer exists, there’s some broad, connect-the-dots speculation about whether Dallas would potentially offer the no. 1 pick to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo, doubling down on the present and exchanging a likely decade-plus run with Flagg for a two-time MVP who will turn 31 in December, has not won a playoff series in three years, and may not age gracefully.
This would be self-sabotage for a few reasons, including the age and financial gaps that sit between Antetokounmpo and Flagg. It’s taking a seat in that aforementioned life raft and immediately looking for the sharpest object you can find to stab a hole in its center. They’ve already short-circuited one lengthy runway for no reason. Accelerating their timeline again, without full control of their own draft capital—Dallas does not have control of its own first-round pick in 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030—would be irredeemably myopic.
A trade between these two teams would gut Dallas’s roster and allocate 70 percent of its cap to Giannis and AD—two great players who make little sense together on offense—before a 33-year-old Irving gets his next contract. Thompson, Gafford, Washington, and another rotation piece would probably be out the door, leaving them with a bunch of empty roster spots and, pending Kyrie’s deal, very little wiggle room below the tax. Does Lively come off the bench, or is he traded for another playmaker? How do they space the floor? Who’s running pick-and-rolls with Giannis and AD?
Consider how much would have to go right for Dallas to win an NBA championship before Davis (who turns 33 next season) or Giannis starts to decline or age out of their current deal. The Western Conference is brutal. The Thunder, Timberwolves, Nuggets, Rockets, Clippers, Spurs, and Lakers should all be pretty good to great next season. The Blazers, Grizzlies, Pelicans, and Kings aren’t trying to lose either. Merely making the postseason, let alone winning multiple playoff series, requires depth, flexibility, and options. Elite talent at the top can get you only so far.
This doesn’t mean the Mavericks will win it all in the next couple of years by keeping Flagg, but that’s not really the point. By keeping the pick (which, to be clear, Harrison should absolutely do!), Dallas can deploy a decent team in the short term without Black Monday–ing its long-term trajectory. Winning this particular lottery is a gift. Not even Harrison is shortsighted enough to bypass that fact.
