The Mavericks have made their direction clear: Cooper Flagg is the future, and Kyrie Irving is still very much part of the picture.
That’s a significant statement for a franchise that reset its timeline after trading Luka Doncic in February 2025. Dallas then caught a huge break in the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery, landing the No. 1 overall pick and using it on Flagg out of Duke University. For a player who came into college with major expectations, Flagg lived up to the billing and kept doing it as a rookie, winning Rookie of the Year along the way.
He has quickly become the kind of piece teams dream about building around. Flagg’s defensive value is already elite, with the ability to handle almost every position at a high level.
On offense, the upside is just as loud. He can make plays off the dribble, and his physical gifts make him extremely difficult to contain.
That combination has made him the Mavericks’ clear cornerstone moving forward. But Dallas is also signaling that Irving isn’t being pushed aside in the transition.
Irving, now 34, remains a high-end talent and still fits as a proven second option. He’s been in Dallas since 2023 and played a major role in the team’s run to the 2024 NBA Finals.
Back then, he was the ideal complement to Doncic. Now, the job looks different: he’s set to be the co-star next to another young star, and he appears ready to embrace that role alongside Flagg.
Team president Masai Ujiri is reportedly a believer in the pairing and has no intention of splitting them up. Other teams may look at the 15-year age gap and question how long this can last, but the Mavericks are buying in.
Looking ahead to the 2026-27 season, Dallas has emerged as a dark horse in the Western Conference. The Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs are drawing most of the buzz, but the Mavericks want to make their own noise with Flagg at the center of it all.
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Cooper Flagg Is Becoming A Mavericks Conversation Fans Can't Ignore
Cooper Flagg has already become impossible to leave out of the Mavericks conversation, and it starts with how quickly he looked at home in Dallas. The No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft backed up the hype with a rookie season that ended in Rookie of the Year honors, then kept turning heads in preseason by flashing the kind of all-around game that makes people recalibrate what a young forward can be.
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 🡒]