Sergio de Larrea is headed to Las Vegas with the Dallas Mavericks, and that alone says plenty about where things stand for the Spanish guard.
When Dallas used the No. 25 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft on de Larrea, the easiest assumption was that he might stay overseas for a while. A “draft and stash” setup made sense on paper. That still hasn’t been ruled out, but the Mavs are at least giving him a runway to show what he can do this summer.
Per Isaac Harris of LockedOnMavs, de Larrea will be with Dallas for Summer League, and the plan is for the 20-year-old and the team to “figure out the future past that.”
The Mavericks will open their Las Vegas slate against the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma City Thunder across four preliminary games, and de Larrea will be part of that group.
His path to Dallas has already been a little winding. The Lakers originally took him at No. 25, then dealt the combo guard to the New York Knicks for the draft rights to Cam Carr. The Knicks then moved de Larrea to Dallas, with the Mavericks sending the rights to Koa Peat to the Phoenix Suns in return.
For now, the intrigue is less about flash and more about fit. De Larrea isn’t the kind of prospect who lives off eye-popping dunks or raw athletic pop.
His value comes from the stuff that tends to travel: size, feel and clean decision-making. At 6-foot-6, he can handle the ball and run an offense, he reads the pick-and-roll well, and he’s grown into a reliable shooter from the perimeter.
GM Mike Schmitz made clear the organization sees real value in that profile.
"We are still working through all of that with Sergio," Schmitz said. "Whether it is next year or the following, to have that level of size and IQ in our program is huge for us. I think we got bigger across all of these different archetypes of players, added more positional size, got tougher and added some IQ as well, and Sergio is a huge part of that."
Schmitz also said the rookie is eager for what’s ahead.
"[De Larrea] is super excited," Schmitz said. "(He is) very excited about the opportunity (to join) the organization. He is actually a Mavs fan at different points of his life growing up, so he shared some of those stories and how thankful he is to be a part of the organization."
For a player who entered the draft with questions about timing, Summer League now looks like the first real checkpoint in Dallas.
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