🤐Cultivate Flag to compete for the championship at the same time? The Mavericks don t dream, the Warriors can t do the dual-line plan

Translator's note: This article was originally published from CBS, and the author is Sam Quinn. The data in the article are as of the original article as of May 27 (local time). The views in the article have nothing to do with the translator and the platform.

It is reported that the Dallas Mavericks are considering adopting a double-timeline team building strategy, but they almost struggle to meet the needs of a single timeline.

The more Dallas invests in the present, the less resources it retains for Cooper Flag's future construction.

If the Dallas Mavericks want to compete for the 2026 NBA championship, they are likely to need to invest more future assets into the present. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean trading Cooper Flag after miraculously winning the 2025 NBA draft lottery, but putting their remaining young players and draft capital on the shelves as bargaining chips may be a necessary move. Due to the injury of Kyrie Irving, the Mavericks will lose their backcourt offensive core at least early next season, and it can even be said that the backcourt scoring firepower is almost vacuum. Anthony Davis himself also has serious potential for injury. When Davis played as a power forward and Flag served as a small forward, the team's lineup was far from optimal configuration. Therefore, if the Mavericks want to compete with strong teams such as the Oklahoma City Thunder, it is likely that they need to make significant investments in the immediate combat power level.

If the Dallas Mavericks want to compete for the championship from the late 2020s to the early 2030s, they may have to sacrifice some of their current combat power to consolidate their future foundation. They don't have any of their first-round picks from 2027 to 2030. Lefly is the only young player in their team who has proven his ability to start for a good team. Even if Flag reaches his peak, he may still need a defender to create opportunities for him. But Irving is 33 years old and Davis is 32 years old. When Flag began to reach his peak, the two stars were likely to have passed their peak, and due to the lack of draft picks, the Mavericks will find it difficult to easily fill the lost star power. So if Dallas wants to optimize the lineup at Flag’s peak, they should probably trade Davis now for a generous return, avoid signing a long-term contract extension with Irving, and prepare for the reconstruction period in the next few years at the expense of the present.

Every team is facing this dilemma in some form. Unless you are trading multiple stars to enrich your asset reserves and then successfully rebuild new stars through the draft, planning both short-term and long-term competitiveness is usually not realistic. If you don't devote yourself to the present, you will often lose to teams that choose to give it a try; if you don't hoard assets for the future, you will usually be surpassed by those well-stocked teams when you chase top stars in the trading market. Generally speaking, choosing a timeline is a smarter approach.

But the Mavericks don't seem to plan to do so. All signs indicate that the Mavericks are about to start building a double timeline lineup - both focusing on Davis and Irving to strive for the current championship, and looking forward to continuing to maintain competitiveness after Flag grew into an expected star. But the historical fact of the NBA is that dual timeline planning often means that both ends are difficult to take into account.

Take the Golden State Warriors in recent years as an example, this is a well-known negative teaching material. Granted, they won the championship in 2022 early in the double timeline strategy, but that has little to do with the young players they are looking for in the future to rebuild.

Look at their 2022 playoff rotation lineup. In the 2022 playoffs, nine players have played for at least 150 minutes. Three of them are the mainstays over the age of 30: Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green; three are veterans signed in the free market: Otto Porter, Gary Payton II and Belicia, who were both 28 or older at the time. Andrew Wiggins was only 26 years old at the time, but his joining was somewhat special. The Warriors were willing to pay record luxury taxes at the time, and took Russell with the salary created by Durant's contract, and then exchanged Russell for Wiggins. This kind of operation is no longer allowed under the new labor-management agreement. Kevin Looney is 25 years old and Jordan Poole is 22 years old, but they are both "unexpected surprises" selected by the Warriors in the final round of the first round of the dynasty era. The young players that the Warriors have high expectations have not played an important role in the 2022 playoff journey. Kumingga and Moody, the two who won the lottery pick in the previous year's draft, played very little; James Wiseman did not play at all due to injury. There may be two timelines in the team, but only one of them helped the team win the championship, and the many conditions it relies on to win the championship are unreplicable by the Mavericks.

The Warriors have a top ten player in history, and the Mavericks have no NBA top ten players; the Warriors have three self-trained stars who have worked together for ten years, and the Mavericks just gathered Davis and Irving in February, and they hardly played together, and Flagg has not made their debut yet; the Warriors can exploit multiple salary loopholes to build a record total salary in the lineup, and the current labor-capital agreement prevents the Mavericks from doing the same thing; the Warriors face relatively conventional opponents in the playoffs, and the Mavericks are in an era where they have a historically powerful Oklahoma City team, not to mention rising opponents like San Antonio and Houston who accumulate assets and are rising through similar team building strategies. The Warriors don't need to exhaust all their young players and draft picks to build a 2022 championship roster because they have many other favorable factors that the Mavericks don't have.

Let's take a look at the situation after the Warriors won the championship in 2022. Poole and Kuminggaben need to spend a critical period of growth in the bottom team and be cultivated as high-use scorers, but the Warriors tried to get them into the system as role players and ended up in failure. Moody is a role player in theory, but the Warriors frequently adjust his playing time and positioning over the years, causing his growth to fail to meet expectations. No matter which team is selected, Wiseman is likely to lose weight, but it is not helpful for his development to ask him to play in an offensive system that emphasizes passing and cutting. He may be the most suitable as an all-in-one threat to pull the pick-and-roll down, and to play more conventional pick-and-roll tactics. As time goes by, the Warriors abandoned their double timeline strategy: Wiseman and Poole were sent away by the trade; veteran Jimmy Butler was introduced in high-profile manner on the 2025 trade deadline, and Kumingga faded out of the rotation lineup. The Warriors tried the double timeline strategy, but eventually returned to a single timeline.

Remember: The Warriors have trustworthy capital - they have won three championships when they started the dual-timeline program. Nico Harrison never scored the championship, and before Flag's draft draw, his trading Luca Doncic to the Lakers was regarded as one of the worst deals in NBA history. If the Mavericks now fire Harrison and hire Bob Myers, you might be able to reluctantly convince yourself to accept this strategy even if Miles' own Warriors fail to successfully implement a dual-timeline strategy. But Harrison himself has obviously not won the same "capital of trust".

For the 2025-26 season, the most likely result is that with Irving's absence, the Mavericks can only become a seed team in the second half of the playoffs, and may even have to pass the fierce playoffs to barely squeeze into the playoffs. In the Western Conference with many strong teams, they will become a huge upset to enter the Finals, and this is still without considering Davis' health. For all these reasons, they are likely to be out early in the playoffs next season.

Perhaps by the opening game of the 2026-27 season, Irving will be able to recover from a 34-year-old who has just recovered from the ACL tear, what does "health" mean? He is a 6-foot-2-inch (about 1.88 meters) defender, and only nine players in history 6-foot-2-inch and under were selected for the All-Star season in the 34-year-old and older, three of whom were before the NBA-ABA merger. Two years later, his performance is likely to be a cliff-like decline, and so is Davis. PJ Washington and Daniel Gafford are free agents in 2026 and the Mavericks will feel the salary pressure elsewhere in the roster if their asking price goes high. If they trade these players for the help of defenders now, the defenders they get may not be cheap either. They have been linked to 34-year-old Ju Holiday, who has also begun to move into a career downhill.

The Dallas Mavericks are currently not strong enough to win the championship immediately. But if the Mavericks actively try to win in the present, where is Flag's position? When Alexander, Vinban Yama and Amen Thompson all have a terrifying core lineup and have a significant advantage in draft pick reserves, how should the Mavericks build a team around Flag when draft picks are at a disadvantage? Flag will be at a clear disadvantage when facing such a team. It may be too early to think about these things now, but this is the NBA. You know what happens when a top young player repeatedly finds himself in a situation where he is in a weak roster but wants to fight against a super strong team. He will leave.

This is the hidden danger that the double timeline strategy has laid for the Mavericks: they may not be strong enough at the moment, and refusal to let go may lead to the future not being strong enough in the future. It is wise to invest in the future. As Dirk Nowitzki showed, if done properly, Flag could play as a city hero in Dallas for twenty years, and he could help fans out of Doncic's heartache of being traded and build a sustainable and victorious team. Davis still has huge transaction value, and this path is still feasible.

Of course, there is a reason Davis has a huge deal value - he is still a great player. Despite the risks, the Mavericks have a reason to choose another path: they can still take out multiple first-round picks to immediately improve their combat power. This will still put Flag in a difficult situation in a few years, but winning enough victories at the moment may accumulate enough goodwill to convince Flag that the team is capable of solving the problem. This is not the path I suggest, but considering that there will be a lot of stars to chase this offseason, this approach is feasible to some extent.

The timeline around Flag may have a brighter prospect, but the timeline around Davis Irving may not necessarily need to be completely abandoned. If handled properly, either of these two timelines has the potential to win the championship. But trying to balance the two is not feasible. If the Warriors all need to choose a lane in the end, the Mavericks also need to make a choice.