Mavericks fans rebelled after Luka Dončić was traded. An improbable win in the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes should ease the pain

Dallas Mavericks fans have spent the last few months in something akin to open rebellion against the team’s front office after franchise icon Luka Dončić was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. On Monday, that all might have just become incredibly turbulent water under the bridge. The Mavs won the NBA lottery, getting the first pick in the draft and the chance to replace Dončić with Duke phenom Cooper Flagg. Going into the night with just a 1.8% shot of getting the No. 1 pick, the Mavericks might have just lucked into one of the all-time great draft shocks in sports history. Consider this: in the period after the deal, the Mavericks went 14-21, lost Anthony Davis – the main player they received in return for Dončić – for weeks due to injury in his first game with the team, lost talisman Kyrie Irving to a season-ending ACL injury and watched a slew of other players go down hurt. Davis returned as the Mavs tried to win a spot in the NBA playoffs through the play-in round but ultimately fell short. During that entire time, the fans demanded the dismissal of general manager Nico Harrison, the architect of the deal to send Dončić to the City of Angels, and pundits declared that the Mavericks had just made a potentially franchise killing move. Dončić is just 26 years old, led the team to the NBA Finals a season earlier, had been named All-NBA each year he had been in the league and was entering his prime. All reporting around the deal indicated that Dončić never planned to leave Dallas, and his emotional return to Texas indicated that the pain of the surprise move still lingers with him. All in all, it was shaping up to be a disaster of historic proportions. How far would the franchise sink after placing its hopes on the shoulders of an aging core of players who are frequently injured and watching the anticipated cornerstone of the franchise link up with LeBron James and the Lakers? Guess we’ll never know. The impending arrival of Flagg – the widely-anticipated top pick in the draft unless Dallas and Harrison decide to shock the basketball world once again – means the Mavericks will replace Dončić with one of the game’s brightest young talents. At Duke, Flagg sometimes looked like he was playing a different game than the opposition. There were few things he couldn’t do, even though he was among the youngest players in the country; he didn’t turn 18 until the season had already started. He averaged 19.2 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.2 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.2 steals in 37 games for the Blue Devils, who lost in the men’s Final Four to the University of Houston in the final minutes. His trophy case from his one year in the college game is staggering. He won the Naismith Award as college basketball’s top player and won national player of the year by five of the six organizations that hand out the honor. He was the ACC player of the year, the ACC’s rookie of the year, a consensus first-team all-American and was the East Region Outstanding Player as the Blue Devils steam rolled their way to the Final Four. “It’s been a rough year as you all know,” Rolando Blackman, Mavericks ambassador and four-time NBA All-Star, said in an ESPN interview after the lottery. “We’ll get a chance to move our franchise forward … It’s really, really a great honor, and it’s an important piece of the puzzle because we want to hoop down in Dallas.” Blackman said that Flagg “can hoop, he can play,” adding, “There’s a lot of great players in that draft class … We will see how the guys get together and being able to make our team better which is exactly what we want to do.” An outstanding two-way player, Flagg will hope to fulfill Harrison’s oft-repeated pledge in the wake of the Dončić trade: that defense wins championships. Dončić’s relative lack of defensive prowess was the main reason that Harrison justified the trade publicly, although reports after the deal indicated there were questions about his fitness, commitment and disagreements with team personnel that helped drive a wedge between the Slovenian star and the Mavs. Dončić was absolutely beloved by the Mavericks fanbase – “He was ours,” Dallas fan John Tarrant told CNN Sports earlier this year. It’s hard to imagine that Flagg will completely replace the 6-foot-6-inch, 230-pound, Dončić-shaped gap in the hearts of Mavs fans – at least right away. But his anticipated arrival in the Metroplex is likely to begin to quell one of the most tumultuous periods for any team in recent memory. It’s enough to give a whole city a collective case of whiplash. And for Harrison – the source of the city’s ire, the man who bears responsibility for the Dončić trade and became one of the most ridiculed executives in sports – it suddenly looks like an insane gamble might have paid off. If the Mavericks find themselves making a deep playoff run in a year or two, the embattled GM will likely be telling anyone within earshot: “I told you so!” Whether he’d deserve to do so is a fair question. He and his team entered Monday with a 1.8% chance of getting the top pick and got a lucky bounce which was so unlikely that online conspiracy theories were immediately created to explain it. There’s no evidence of a conspiracy. Instead, it’s just cemented something we already knew: the Dallas Mavericks’ 2025 is going down as one of the most unlikely rollercoaster rides in sports history. Surely, Harrison is going to make the easy choice and take Flagg with the top pick. But after the last few months, it’d be hard to blame any Mavs fans for being on the edge of their seats until the teenage star’s name is called by commissioner Adam Silver in Brooklyn next month.