Former Maverick Richard Jefferson is not predicting a title run, but he believes a healthy Mavericks roster has enough high-end talent to disrupt the Western Conference.
DALLAS - Most of the national conversation about the Mavericks this offseason has landed somewhere between skeptical and dismissive. Richard Jefferson offered a different read.
Discussing Western Conference title odds on the Road Trippin' podcast, Jefferson was asked which teams outside the top 10 could disrupt the picture, and Dallas was the first name that came to mind.
"Dallas, they could pop up," Jefferson said. "That was the first team I said when it was like, who is a team that's outside that you could look at, could actually shift some things up. And again, we're not saying Dallas is gonna be top six. We're saying if Dallas was 8 in the play-in and won the first game and were the 7 seed, you wouldn't be like, 'Where did this come from?'"
That framing is worth considering because it is more measured than a bold prediction and more useful because of it. Jefferson is not arguing the Mavericks are contenders. He is arguing that a Dallas team sneaking into the seventh seed would surprise nobody who has actually looked at the roster, which is a meaningfully different claim from what the projections suggest.
His reasoning came down to talent.
"I think Dallas is the one team that has enough talent, high-level talent, that if they're healthy, things are rolling, you could see them doing something," Jefferson said.
The condition matters as much as the compliment. Health has been the defining variable for this roster, and the group on the podcast briefly turned to the two players who make the whole thing work, Kyrie Irving and Cooper Flagg. Irving is returning from the torn ACL that cost him all of last season, while Flagg enters his second year coming off a Rookie of the Year campaign in which he led the team in points, rebounds, assists and steals.
That pairing is the entire argument. Few teams projected outside the playoff picture have a player of Irving's caliber alongside a young star with Flagg's ceiling. Most lottery-bound rosters lack high-end talent altogether, while Dallas has been missing availability.
Jefferson is also speaking with some familiarity with the organization, having played 41 games for the Mavericks during the 2014-15 season before finishing his career with stops in Cleveland, Denver and Los Angeles.
Jefferson is not promising a leap, and he acknowledged that a top-six finish is unlikely in a conference this deep. What he is saying is that the floor and ceiling for this Mavericks team are further apart than most projections account for and that the version where Dallas grabs a play-in spot and advances is possible.
