Dallas Mavericks

Dallas Mavericks, American professional basketball team based in Dallas that plays in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Mavericks have won one NBA championship (2011).

Founding and first decades

The Mavericks were founded in 1980 and, like most expansion teams, struggled in their first seasons in the NBA. Dallas posted its first winning season and gained a playoff berth in its fourth year, behind young stars Mark Aguirre, Derek Harper, and Rolando Blackman. The team continued to infuse its roster with talent through savvy draft choices in the mid-1980s, and the Mavericks qualified for the postseason in five consecutive years from the 1983–84 season to the 1987–88 season, which included a berth in the Western Conference finals in 1988. By 1990 many of the team’s star players had left Dallas—either via free agency or trades—and the Mavericks fell into a prolonged period of futility. The team finished with a losing record in each year of the following decade, including back-to-back woeful seasons of 11–71 and 13–69.

The Dirk Nowitzki era

The Mavericks’ turnaround began with the arrival of point guard Steve Nash and forward Dirk Nowitzki before the 1998–99 season. In 2000 Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban purchased the franchise and initiated a new era of free spending for the Mavericks. Cuban, one of the league’s most flamboyant and outspoken owners, upgraded the team’s facilities and made Dallas an attractive location for free agents for the first time in years. Head coach and general manager Don Nelson oversaw the acquisition of quality supporting talent, and Dallas trotted out high-powered offenses led by Nash, Nowitzki, and sharpshooter Michael Finley.

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The Mavericks were routinely one of the top teams in the Western Conference in the first decade of the 21st century, and, despite Nash’s having left Dallas in 2004, they advanced to the first NBA Finals berth in team history in 2006, when they lost to the Miami Heat in six games. The Mavericks had the best regular-season record in the NBA in 2006–07 but experienced playoff disappointment: in the opening postseason series, Dallas became the first top-seeded team to lose a seven-game series to an eighth-seeded (lowest-seeded) team, the Golden State Warriors.

Dallas remained one of the NBA’s better teams through the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and in 2009–10 it became the fourth team in league history to post 10 consecutive seasons of at least 50 victories. In 2010–11, behind tremendous playoff scoring by Nowitzki, the Mavericks again advanced to the NBA Finals, where they defeated the Heat to capture their first NBA championship. In 2012–13 an aging Mavericks team posted a .500 record, which brought an end to their 12-year playoff streak. The team rebounded the following season to win 49 games and clinch a postseason berth. Dallas also qualified for the playoffs over the next two seasons, but the team never advanced past the first round in those three appearances. In 2016–17 a further depleted roster and a less effective Nowitzki resulted in the team posting its first losing record in 17 seasons. In the subsequent two seasons the Mavericks continued to produce losing records, and Nowitzki’s role was further reduced until he retired at the end of the 2018–19 campaign that saw Dallas finish last in its division.

Luka Dončić and a shocking trade

The next of era Mavericks basketball was centered on the team’s young star guard, Luka Dončić, of Slovenia. In his second season, 2019–20, Dončić finished fourth in voting for the league’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) en route to leading his team back to the playoffs, but Dallas lost in the first round. After another first-round playoff loss in the subsequent season, the Mavericks hired Jason Kidd—a former NBA point guard whom the team had drafted in 1994—as head coach. The team excelled under Kidd’s leadership, making it to the Western Conference finals in 2021–22, where the Mavericks lost to the Warriors in five games.

Dallas traded for guard Kyrie Irving during the next season, but the reconfigured roster was not able to jell quickly enough and the team missed the playoffs. The Mavericks regrouped in 2023–24 behind the offensively dominant Irving-Dončić backcourt and entered the playoffs as a fifth seed. They beat higher seeds for three straight rounds to make their first finals since 2011, facing the Boston Celtics. There the Celtics’ elite defense smothered Dallas’s offensive production, and the Mavs lost in five games. Meanwhile, in December 2024, Cuban sold his majority share of the team to a group led by Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

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In February 2025 the Mavericks shocked the league by trading Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for center Anthony Davis. Dallas fans were outraged to lose their star player and staged several protests outside the team’s arena. Their anger was somewhat ameliorated when the Mavericks won the top pick in the NBA draft lottery, despite having only a 1.8 percent chance of doing so. At the draft in June, the team selected phenom Cooper Flagg, considered among the best prospects since Davis.

Cooper Flagg ascendant

Shortly after the 2025–26 season began, the Mavericks’ ownership fired the general manager who made the ill-fated Dončić trade, and in January 2026 Davis was traded. Amid that tumult, Flagg emerged as an extremely promising standard-bearer for the franchise, and he was named Rookie of the Year.