The Mavericks' offseason overhaul earned some optimism, but projections remain cautious about how quickly the new roster and coaching staff will come together.
Training camp opens in a few weeks, which means the annual wave of preseason predictions is arriving. ESPN's NBA Summer Forecast dropped Monday, with the network's panel of insiders projecting where all 30 teams will finish. Dallas landed 12th in the Western Conference at 32-50, two spots outside the play-in tournament and a six-win improvement over last season's 26-56 finish.
The company Dallas keeps in that projection says plenty about how the league views the roster. The Mavericks sit behind the Clippers at 33-49 and ahead of Memphis, New Orleans and Sacramento, a group ESPN described as being in the relatively early stages of a franchise reset. That framing puts Dallas closer to the lottery tier than the contender tier, at least in the eyes of the panel.
ESPN did acknowledge the reasons for optimism. The forecast noted that the Mavericks are optimistic they can be competitive in Cooper Flagg's second season, pointing to the overhaul of the front office and coaching staff that brought in Masai Ujiri to run basketball operations and Dusty May to coach the team.
But the biggest swing factor, according to ESPN, is the player who never left. The forecast identified Kyrie Irving's return as probably the most impactful addition of the offseason, noting that the nine-time All-Star should provide a major jolt to an offense that ranked 27th in the league last season.
That offensive ranking is the number worth sitting with. Dallas finished the year with a minus-5.6 net rating, but the picture was uglier after the trade deadline than before it. The Mavericks were 19-31 with a minus-2.8 net rating up to that point, meaning a large share of the damage came during a stretch when the roster had largely stopped resembling an NBA rotation. Fixing an offense that bad does not require a miracle. It requires competent shot creation, which is precisely what was missing.
That context matters because the balance of power around the league looks different than it has in years. LeBron James left the Lakers for Philadelphia, taking one of the West's marquee names east. The East, long considered the lesser conference, has spent the offseason aggressively retooling around the champion Knicks. ESPN's own projections reflect it, with four Eastern Conference teams pegged for 50 or more wins and five at 48 or better. Even last season, the East had more teams with winning records than the West, 10 to nine. The West still has Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Denver at the top, but the depth behind them is thinner than it has been in a long time.
The rest of the projection hinges on questions nobody can settle in August. Whether Irving looks like himself after a torn ACL at 34 matters enormously. So does the size of Flagg's sophomore leap and whether Dusty May's system translates from college to an 82-game NBA schedule in his first season.
What the projection really says is that ESPN's panel isn't convinced the pieces fit yet. A six-win jump credits the roster upgrades without assuming they cohere immediately, which is a reasonable position for a team integrating a new coach, a new front office philosophy and a rotation full of players who have never shared a floor.
Still, projections have a way of becoming motivation. The Mavericks have spent the entire summer being told they improved without being told it will amount to much. Proving ESPN wrong would be a fine way to open the next chapter.
