Fortune favors the foolish: Lottery luck saves Mavs from themselves

Monday night's NBA draft lottery stirred up a lot of complicated feelings as the Dallas Mavericks were awarded the No. 1 pick and the right to draft Cooper Flagg despite having a mere 1.8% chance to do so going in.

On one hand, not many of the league's fan bases needed it more. On the other hand, no front office or ownership group deserved it less. These are the same people who just traded a 25-year-old superstar mere months after he led their team to the Finals; the same people who only seriously engaged with one other team in the process, ultimately accepted a package headlined by a lesser star on the wrong side of 30 and one measly draft pick, and then offered up half-baked justifications for their approach while repeatedly throwing their erstwhile franchise player under the bus.

For Dallas fans, this was the only possible way to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by the Luka Doncic trade. Before the moment the lottery machine improbably spat out one of their team's combinations, they had no path to any kind of recovery anytime soon. Not only was Doncic gone, but Kyrie Irving suffered a torn ACL that'll sideline him until he's a 34-year-old impending free agent, and Anthony Davis is already a 32-year-old walking injury risk. That was on top of the fact that the aforementioned front office ceded control of all its own first-round picks between 2027 and 2030 in an effort to build around the guy they ultimately traded against his will. There was no hope for the team's present and even less for the future. So, yeah, Mavericks fans needed this.

I've seen some people argue that the Mavs deserved this more than some of the NBA's most shameless tankers because, rather than throwing in the towel after their catastrophic rash of injuries in the immediate wake of the Doncic trade, their skeleton crew played incredibly hard to secure a play-in spot and even win a game. So kudos to Naji Marshall, I guess. He earned this.

But for neutral observers, fans of 29 other teams in the league, and probably even those recently disillusioned Mavericks fans, it just doesn't sit right that Dallas owner Patrick Dumont and general manager Nico Harrison get to feel like their galaxy-brained plan worked out. Their reward for casting aside a prime-aged, transcendent talent in the middle of a championship window is the chance to draft an 18-year-old prodigy four months later. And one who plays defense, no less! Where's the justice in that?

Of course, when bouncing pingpong balls decide the fate of franchises, justice isn't meant to be part of the equation. But no matter the extent to which we intellectually grasp that reality, in our heart of hearts, part of us always wants to believe some degree of cosmic retribution is guiding this ridiculous enterprise. Not so long ago, it felt like the Mavs had cursed themselves. So much for that.

As for how landing the top pick will shape the team, it's almost as big a lifeline as the Mavs gifted the Lakers back in February. Flagg has the makings of a two-way star, marrying elite physical tools with slick ball skills and advanced playmaking and defensive feel. Suddenly, the future in Dallas looks pretty bright.

The big question is how this will change the front office's plans for the present day. The purpose of the team as currently constructed was to try to compete for championships over the next two or three years, but Irving's injury essentially nuked that plan. Flagg's arrival offers an opportunity to seamlessly change course, should the Mavs choose to do so.

The Duke product should be able to make a positive impact as a rookie, but he won't instantly yank Dallas back into contention with Irving on the sidelines. There's obvious roster-building tension in wedging a teenaged cornerstone next to a 13-year vet in Davis on a team that likely won't compete for anything meaningful in 2025-26. At the moment, 21-year-old center Dereck Lively II is the only other high-end prospect on the roster. Would the Mavs consider moving Davis, despite what they gave up to get him, in order to rebuild from scratch around Flagg and Lively?

That's not to say continuing on their current path would necessarily be a bad idea. The hope in that scenario would be that Flagg is good enough right away to essentially fuse two timelines into one. But if that is indeed the plan, Dallas will need to do some work to reshuffle a roster that's almost entirely bereft of guards and logjammed in the frontcourt.

As fun as it sounds to watch gargantuan lineups featuring all of Flagg, Davis, Lively, and P.J. Washington - and as defensively suffocating as those lineups would be - the Mavs clearly need a lead ball-handler. Irving's likely going to miss all of next season, and there's no guarantee he'll be close to the same player when he returns. Dallas is almost certainly going to have to cash in some of its big-man depth in order to bolster its backcourt.

Those are tomorrow's problems, though. The bottom line is the Mavericks now have real, viable, genuinely exciting options that they decidedly lacked 24 hours ago. They've been busted out of a prison of their own making, benefiting from one of the most egregious deus ex machinas in NBA history.

All fan bases feel that they're owed something - even the most spoiled ones - and most wind up disappointed the vast majority of the time. Any of them would react to a rare win of this magnitude by finding a way to say, "We deserve this." And although we all know deserve's got nothing to do with it, that won't stop Mavs fans from reveling in this feeling of salvation a few months after experiencing the depths of helplessness and betrayal.

Joe Wolfond covers the NBA for theScore.