Dallas was competitive far more often than its 26 wins suggested and Kyrie Irving gives the Mavericks a proven closer to help turn those losses into wins.
There is a single number that explains a large part of why the Mavericks won 26 games last season, and it has nothing to do with talent evaluation or roster construction.
Dallas tied for the league lead with 45 clutch games in 2025-26, defined as games within five points in the final five minutes. The Mavericks went 17-28 in them. That is a lot of basketball played with the outcome hanging in the balance and a lot of nights that ended the wrong way.
For a team that lost 56 games, being that competitive that often is actually encouraging. The Mavericks were rarely blown out of relevance. They simply struggled to finish, and closing games is a skill that can be improved.
The explanation is not complicated. The Mavericks fielded one of the younger rosters in the NBA and asked it to close out games without the player who has spent his career specializing in exactly that. Cooper Flagg was a teenager learning on the fly. The supporting cast around him had never been asked to make those decisions. Experience matters more in the last five minutes than at any other point in a game, and Dallas had almost none of it available.
Kyrie Irving changes that immediately.
Irving's resume in these moments is about as strong as any active player's. He hit the Game 7 dagger over Stephen Curry to win the 2016 Finals for Cleveland, a shot that lives permanently in league highlight reels. He beat Denver in 2024 with a left-handed floater from the free-throw line that had no business going in. He owns a 15-1 record in career closeout games in the postseason, averaging 23.5 points in those outings.
The Dallas-specific numbers back it up. In the 2023-24 season, the Mavericks went 16-4 in clutch games, one of the best marks in the league. Irving ranked among the NBA's top 10 in clutch scoring at 4.2 points per game while shooting 60% from the field and 42% from 3-point range in those situations.
That is the difference between having a closer and not having one. Late-game offense tends to devolve into isolation possessions against a set defense, and there are only a handful of players in the league who reliably generate quality looks in that environment. Irving is one of them. He also draws enough defensive attention to create openings for everyone else, which matters for a roster full of young players who benefit from simplified reads.
There is a secondary benefit worth noting, too. All those clutch losses last season were not wasted. Flagg and the rest of the young core spent an entire year in high-pressure situations, absorbing the experience even while losing. Players learn from those possessions whether they win or not, and Dallas now has a group that has been through it, paired with a veteran who knows how to finish.
The Mavericks do not need to become a great team to make a significant jump this season. They need to convert a reasonable share of the close games they were always going to play. Given how many one-possession games this roster found itself in last year, even a modest improvement in that column changes the win total meaningfully.
