Are the Mavericks built to last — or are fans living in a house of cards?

The Dallas Mavericks are one of the biggest talking-point conundrums in the NBA as the 2025-26 season approaches. What if Nico Harrison’s off-brand of 4-D chess, combined with a massive stroke of insane draft lottery luck, actually works out? What if, on the other hand, the bottom completely falls out in the first full year after Harrison let go of Luka Dončić and his other-worldly generational talent for Anthony Davis, while Kyrie Irving sits on the shelf for most of this season?

What if Cooper Flagg sets the world on fire and can do no wrong in his first year? What if he plays like a (gasp) rookie at times? What if D’Angelo Russell is able to effectively bridge the gap at point guard as Irving recovers? What if Dante Exum and undrafted rookie Ryan Nembhard end up being the team’s best options at the one?

All these possibilities, and more, are in play, not only for this year, but for the three- to four-year window Harrison has repeatedly said he’s eyeing for this iteration of the Mavs to work its way back into championship form. And that’s where ESPN’s recently released NBA Future Power Rankings take the conversation. Analysts Tim Bontemps, Bobby Marks and Kevin Pelton published this piece, which focuses on a three-year outlook of all NBA teams and ranks them according to trajectory in that window. Bontemps and his podcast co-hosts Tim MacMahon and Brian Windhorst broke down the piece in Friday’s episode of Hoop Collective.

Spoiler alert: the Mavericks’ stock is falling like a rock in the eyes of Bontemps, Marks and Pelton. Dallas dropped from fifth in the league in three-year outlook before the Luka Dončić trade and all that came after it, to 16th in three-year outlook this time around. The analysts determined that the most important category is the team’s current roster and the future potential of those players. That category accounts for 50% of each NBA team’s overall Future Power Rating, which is a 0-100 score each team receives to determine its overall ranking. The Mavs’ overall score ahead of the 2025-26 season was a 50.1, right in the muddled meaty middle of the curve.

It’s hard for even the most plugged-in analysts to tell where this thing is headed, basically.

Several other factors — management, ownership, coaching, a team’s spending habits, its cap situation, the city’s and franchise’s reputation, and the type of draft picks the team appears to have in the future — went into the other 50% of each team’s 0-100 score. The Mavs ranked 20th in the league in management, which seems generous, 10th in market, 21st in draft pick outlook, 24th in salary cap and 11th in current roster.

“Cooper Flagg floats nothing,” Brian Windhorst said when the conversation turned to the Mavericks. “[How far would the team have fallen] if they didn’t hit the lottery?”

“[The Mavericks] would have been a lot lower,” Bontemps said. “It’s not just Luka leaving [that Cooper Flagg can’t make up for alone], it’s also Kyrie’s torn ACL, and, yes, maybe he’ll play at some point this season, but this is an old roster that, Nico Harrison has repeatedly said has a three- to four-year time horizon. Yea, Cooper probably boosted [the Mavericks] a few spots by himself, but there’s a lot of questions about the medium-term future of the Mavs, especially when you’re built around one guy with a torn ACL and another guy in Anthony Davis who is very, very good but also is consistently banged up.”

To put the team management rankings in perspective, MacMahon offered a good point.

“According to Nico, this is why they traded a five-time All-NBA first-teamer just entering his prime, by the way who was just coming off an NBA Finals run — to create a three- to four-year Championship window,” MacMahon said. “And look (~we sense a high level of MacMahon-branded snark here~), Nico has proof that this is a championship-caliber team — did you see those two and a half quarters against the Houston Rockets? Honestly, I’m a little bit surprised that [the Mavs’] management was [ranked] 20, because I mean, it’s the most controversial and panned trade in NBA history, and it completely exposed the flaws in terms of there being no checks and balances for Nico in the organization. You have an owner who a year and a half in is very much learning the NBA on the fly. That’s a predicament. It’s a fascinating deal, because is Cooper Flagg the most hyped American prospect since LeBron? He’s in the short list, for sure, but building around him will be challenging because of all the draft picks you gave up to successfully build around Luka.”

Are there 10 worse NBA front offices out there than the one run by Harrison and Patrick Dumont? Ten seems high — the Mavericks probably should have been scored 25th or worse in the management category in light of the fever-dream hallucination driving Harrison’s “vision” and the complete lack of familiarity with the game of basketball Dumont has shown in recent months.

Just to reset the Mavs’ current first-round draft pick situation in the next few years, here it is. They currently own their own 2026 first-round pick. Their 2027 first-round pick will go to the Charlotte Hornets, as part of the trade for PJ Washington, but it is top-2 protected. The Mavs’ 2028 first-rounder is a pick swap owed to Oklahoma City, and it’s safe to assume that the team is going to end up at the bottom of the first round there. That was to get a pick for the deal with the Washington Wizards that brought Daniel Gafford to town. The Mavs’ 2029 first-rounder is gone as part of the Irving deal — it’s now the Rockets’ property. The Mavs do own the Lakers’ 2029 pick, though. Dallas’ 2030 first-round pick will head to San Antonio in a pick swap, which was done in order to dump Reggie Bullock’s salary in the deal oh so long ago to get Grant Williams (who now plays for Charlotte) in a sign-and-trade.

“So [these are] four years very early in Cooper Flagg’s career of not having control of your first round pick,” MacMahon said. “Which is a very narrow path in terms of trying to build a championship caliber team as the future hall of famers that you have now are going to be in their late 30s — Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis, Klay Thompson.

“Lively is going to be a huge key for the Mavericks. He’s a young guy. He was a lottery pick, and I think you can argue he’s proven to be a high-lottery type of talent, but he’s played 91 games in two years. Durability has proven to be a concern, and he’s no longer playing with a point guard who maximizes his talent. The [Luka] trade took away a lot of what Lively does best — the pick-and-roll lob threat.”

Bontemps said he would take the under on 44 wins for the Mavericks this season. He doesn’t think Flagg, even if he does play the point effectively and create opportunities for Lively and Gafford underneath with his passing, can immediately effect the team’s win total in the face of all the obstacles that face this otherwise aging and debilitated roster.

“D’Angelo Russell is fine, but I think the best thing for [Flagg] and for the Mavs long term is to say, hey man, explore the studio place, play point guard, make mistakes, have the ball in your hands, read defenses, figure stuff out, because, maybe Kyrie Irving will be back in March and this team will be a championship contending team,” Bontemps continued. “I think it’s more likely their best chance to do that is next year, when Kyrie is fully healthy and everybody will have played together a year. You might as well expedite his development and see if you can get there faster.”

The Mavericks were not the analysts’ biggest falling stock, though. The Boston Celtics dropped from No. 2 to No. 13 in this year’s rankings, while the Philadelphia 76ers fell all the way from No. 4 last year to No. 19 this year.

Maybe it’s just my own inherent pessimism showing, but I got the sense listening to this that the Hoop Collective boys employed more than a little diplomacy in their Mavs takes on Friday’s episode. Their concerns are spot on and grounded in the facts. I think those concerns will show themselves early and often this year, and it won’t take long for those Mavs fans currently clinging to irrational optimism to realize how big the holes are in the makeup of this organization.

Buckle up for a wild, unpredictable three-year window, Mavs fans — with undercurrents of pervasive and looming despair.