Dereck Lively II has been one of the most important Mavs players this season, filling out the Mavs’ starting 5 by flourishing in a center position that the team has been struggling to get right for a while. He’s been one of the most impressive and talked-about rookies so far this season. But what isn’t getting talked about, what everyone seems to have forgotten about, is the fact that the Mavs never should have been able to draft him in the first place.
Cuban’s Confessions
Last season, the Dallas Mavericks committed one of the most spineless acts I’ve ever seen in professional sports. They took a dive in their last game of the 2022-2023 NBA regular season so that they would miss the Play-In Tournament. This is not an opinion. It is not speculation. Then-owner Mark Cuban admitted pretty frankly to intentionally losing games all throughout April to try to fall in the standings. Not that this came as much of a surprise. The Mavs’ starting 5 during that month didn’t exactly look like a team that was putting their best foot forward. The best Mavs players were routinely seen warming the bench during winnable games and the results spoke for themselves. But for some reason, Mark Cuban felt the need to speak even loader, shouting their intentions from the rooftops.
As he’s done on many occasions, Cuban brazenly boasted about his awareness of and willingness to eat the inevitable fines such actions and statements would warrant. He, of course, has enough money in the bank to hardly even notice such punishments.
Now, I’m not placing blame for this decision squarely on his shoulders. I don’t know what combination of ownership and front-office personnel colluded in hatching this plan. And overall, I do like Mark Cuban. I think he genuinely cares about the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA, and taking stands to support his players on important social issues. As far as billionaire owners go, the guy’s not bad.
But it was deeply troubling to hear him admit to supporting the Mavs’ plan to intentionally lose games, and then to see him celebrating on the sidelines when they lost their final game of the season, which cemented their fate in missing the play-in.
Playing Lotteryball
So, why did the Dallas Mavericks do this? They had traded away their 2023 first-round pick to the New York Knicks with a top-10 protected clause, meaning the Mavs would lose that pick if they ended up getting anything other than a top-10 pick awarded in the 2023 draft lottery. The draft lottery is probability-based, but those probabilities are based on the regular season standings. Making the Play-In Tournament would have virtually guaranteed the Mavs lose their 2023 first-round pick, whereas missing the tournament would have made it extremely likely for them to keep.
It’s no secret that every team in the NBA, to some extent, tries to improve their draft lottery odds by falling in the standings if it’s clear they have no hopes for making the playoffs that year. It’s a practice called “tanking,” which the NBA clearly does not love, but also recognizes it cannot police as long as there is some amount of plausible deniability. In other words, it’s a kind of don’t ask, don’t tell policy. But the Dallas Mavericks took this to an unprecedentedly egregious level. They were not doomed to miss the playoffs. Not at all. As I said, they could have made the Play-In Tournament, giving them a chance to make the playoffs, right up until the very last game of the regular season. And they, of course, could have made the Play-In Tournament by a far less narrow margin if they hadn’t been actively tanking for an entire month by clipping the wings on their starting 5.
Tanking Taken Too Far
The argument for tanking goes, what’s the point of winning games at the end of the regular season if it’s not going to get you anywhere? Sacrifice lukewarm regular season success in the present for more long-term future gains (drafting in a high position). Everyone gets this. It might not be fun for the fans or the players, but everyone understands it’s all in service of a greater goal.
In the Mavs’ case in particular, the argument was, “Well yeah, we can make the Play-In Tournament, but then what? Even if we somehow make it in to the playoffs, we’re not going to have a deep run.” Really? Because the Miami Heat did just that: they squeaked into the Play-In Tournament, made it out as the 8th seed, and then proceeded to claw their way to the NBA Finals. Now, I get it—the Mavs are in the West and they would have had to play the Denver Nuggets at some point in the playoffs, who went 16-4 overall and won the 2023 NBA Championship. The odds were certainly against them. But the point remains, anything can happen in the playoffs. That’s what makes them so exciting to watch. You just never know, especially if you’ve got Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving on your squad.
The whole thing felt like a huge “F You” to the NBA, the Mavs fanbase, the Mavs players, and to the sports world as a whole. In terms of actions that damage the integrity of a professional sports league, I’d put actively working to miss the playoffs right up there with officials betting on games. Seriously, I would. In both cases, the games are decided before they even begin. So there’s really no point in watching them. The difference is, when the NBA had its scandal with refs betting on games, we didn’t know for sure what was happening until after the fact. Whereas, in this case, we were told right to our faces what was happening as it was happening. So in a sense, what the Mavs did was worse: we were told that, despite knowing they could win enough games to make the playoffs, they were just going to keep losing. And that’s gross. Like really, really gross.
What makes it even more gross is the relative lack of punitive action that resulted from this behavior. I think the Mavericks received some kind of punishment, but honestly, it was so minor I can’t even remember what it was. The truly just punishment would have been for them to have to forfeit that draft pick they were so hell-bent on retaining, allowing it to fall to the New York Knicks.
The Mavs’ Stolen Treasure
That didn’t happen. Instead, the Mavs got exactly what they wanted. They packaged that 10th overall pick in a trade, and ended up snagging Dereck Lively II with the 12th overall pick in the 2023 NBA draft. You know, the same Dereck Lively II who’s fit in seamlessly with the Mavs’ starting 5, who’s filled the exact role they needed to fill, who’s averaging the highest field goal percentage among players in the league (about 74% at the moment), and has managed to stay involved in Rookie of the Year talks. As a result, 20+ games into the 2023-2024 NBA regular season, the Dallas Mavericks are jockeying around between the 3rd and 4th seeds of a fiercely competitive Western Conference. They got everything they wanted and more.
Worst of all, nobody cares. Everyone just chose to forget about it. Maybe that’s because we’re all sick of seeing Luka Doncic’s brilliance diminished by a lackluster roster, preventing him from making deep playoff runs. Or maybe it’s because everyone’s just accepted tanking as a fact of life in the NBA.
Sure, it doesn’t bother me if the Detroit Pistons go on a 20-game losing streak, even if I knew they were doing it intentionally—there were no playoff expectations for them this season. But the Mavs clearly crossed the line of acceptable tanking behavior. And I just don’t get why Adam Silver, the media, and the NBA fan community have all turned a blind eye to the fact that, less than a year ago, an NBA team with a perennial MVP candidate and an 8-time All-Star NBA Champion put so much effort into avoiding the playoffs that they had to lose games for a month straight and still almost accidentally fell into the Play-In Tournament, barely dodging it in their final game.
At this point, it’s too late for the NBA to impose any additional retroactive punishment. So I’m not suggesting that’s what should happen. I just want real NBA fans and sports fans of all kinds to remember what the Mavs did in 2022-23, to comprehend the full gutlessness of it, and, if and when the Dallas Mavericks do find themselves in an NBA Semifinals or Finals series, just keep in mind how they got there and if they really deserve it.
