A few months after the Dallas Mavericks matched the New York Knicks’ offer sheet for Moussa Cisse, Dallas may be on the verge of moving on from him altogether.
According to Jake Fischer of The Stein Line, Cisse is on Collateral Damage Watch as the Mavericks work through ways to keep Dwight Powell on their 15-man roster. That alone would be a notable roster wrinkle. It gets even stranger because Dallas had already guaranteed Cisse’s salary by keeping him on the books past October 1.
At the time, the decision to match New York’s offer was odd enough on its own. Cisse came at a relatively modest cost - two years and $4.7 million - but the Mavericks already had a crowded frontcourt mix of bigs and fringe bigs by then. Now that he appears to be a possible casualty anyway, the move is looking less like a simple roster decision and more like something with a little extra edge to it.
The Knicks’ relationship with Dallas hasn’t exactly been smooth since they landed Jalen Brunson in 2022, one of the biggest free-agency wins in NBA history at the Mavericks’ expense. That kind of miss doesn’t fade quietly.
Dallas has changed plenty since then, with Mark Cuban no longer the owner and Nico Harrison no longer the lead basketball executive, but somebody in that front office had to live through it. Enough people were around to remember, and enough people could have had input when it came time to decide whether to match New York’s deal for Cisse.
And if the Brunson angle doesn’t do it, there’s another layer here.
The Knicks also made a hard push for Jason Kidd last offseason before ultimately hiring Mike Brown. Dallas then gave Kidd an extension, only for Patrick Dumont to later sign his walking papers after bringing in Masai Ujiri. That sequence has to leave a mark.
Ujiri brings his own Knicks history, too. He said in 2014 that he hated the organization, and later, while running the Raptors, he publicly dismissed a lawsuit New York filed accusing Toronto of stealing “team secrets.”
From the Knicks’ side, this is mostly a nuisance, not a crisis. They’re in the title-defense phase now, and the Moussa Cisse situation doesn’t move the needle much for them.
But it would still be mildly irritating if Dallas ended up dumping the 24-year-old big man, since he would have fit as a third center on a roster that could use one. The catch is that because the Knicks signed him to an offer sheet, they are blocked from acquiring him in any form for a year.
If Dallas waives him or trades him, New York is out.
So the whole thing leaves one uncomfortable question hanging in the air: did the Mavericks keep Cisse just to make sure the Knicks didn’t get him? Nobody’s saying that for certain. But with the way this is unfolding, it’s hard not to notice the possibility.
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