Masai Ujiri is walking into Dallas with a Cooper Flagg plan that doesn’t come with the usual rebuilding playbook.
That’s the issue for the Mavericks: if you’re trying to build around a young cornerstone, the draft is normally the easiest path to piling up cheap talent on the same timeline. But Dallas doesn’t have that kind of flexibility. Not with its future first-round picks spoken for.
Ujiri made that clear on a recent episode of "Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective," where he addressed the reality of what the Mavericks can and can’t do as he begins this new stretch in his career.
"We have to play good basketball...It's not like we have our picks," Ujiri said.
That reality matters because most teams in Dallas’ position lean heavily on the draft to fill in the edges around their franchise player. They get younger, they take their time, and, when necessary, they let the losses pile up in search of better lottery odds. The Mavericks can’t really operate that way.
They do not own their first-round pick in the 2027 NBA Draft, and the picks in the two years after that are tied up in swaps. Dallas will still make a first-round selection in each of those seasons, but the way things are set up, those picks are likely to come much closer to the back end of the round.
That strips away one of the most dependable tools for building around Flagg. Instead of stocking up on young talent through the draft year after year, the Mavericks are left looking at a narrower set of options: getting lucky later in the draft, moving up for someone they covet, or finding Flagg’s running mate through a trade or free agency.
The San Antonio Spurs offer a clear example of how this usually works when a team has the draft ammunition. They drafted Stephon Castle at No. 4 and Dylan Harper at No. 2 overall, and now they’re one of the best teams in the Western Conference and have reached the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014.
Their roster was built with a heavy dose of homegrown talent. The Spurs drafted five of their six top points-per-game scorers from last season, with De’Aaron Fox as the only exception. That kind of draft success helped turn Victor Wembanyama’s support system into something special.
Dallas, though, is not in that lane. Ujiri knows it, and the Mavericks know it too. They can’t tank their way into the kind of draft haul that most rebuilding teams chase, and they can’t count on their own picks to keep delivering premium swings.
That means the job in Dallas is going to require a different kind of creativity. The Mavericks did add to their young core this summer, drafting Sergio De Larrea and Morez Johnson Jr. in the first round and trading for Zaccharie Risacher. But that sort of draft-driven boost is not something they can expect to repeat every year.
So the mandate is simple, even if the route is complicated: play good basketball, keep developing the young pieces already in place, and find another way to put a contender around Flagg without the luxury most rebuilds depend on.
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Cooper Flagg Is Becoming A Mavericks Conversation Fans Can't Ignore
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DeMarcus Cousins added to the noise by lumping Flagg into a rarefied group of stylistic comparisons, putting pieces of Kevin Durant, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo into the same sentence. For Mavericks fans, the bigger point is less about the name-dropping than the fact that Flagg keeps checking every box so early, which is why the questions around him have moved well beyond whether he belongs and into what kind of star Dallas is actually watching take shape. [Read more 🡒]