Extreme situation in Dallas: the Mavs could lose games due to this obscure NBA rule

On Feb. 2, the Dallas Mavericks pulled off a trade that turned the NBA (the entire sports world, in fact) upside down when they traded Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. The league’s landscape, for this season and likely for the following ones, suddenly changed, with a seismic shift that no one had seen coming. So massive and so truly bizarre that Shams Charania (ESPN), the journalist who announced it, said his hands were shaking and that everyone was asking him, when he posted the tweet, if his phone had been hacked. No one could believe it.

The Mavericks' arguments have been discussed a lot in the last month and a half: Nico Harrison, the top dog in the front office, was unhappy with the way Doncic is handling himself and had convinced himself that it was better to have another point guard for the team even though the Slovenian had been an All-Star and a member of the All-NBA Team in five consecutive seasons, and had led the Mavs to the last NBA Finals.

Few share Harrison’s vision (with new owners after the sale by the legendary Mark Cuban), the executive spoke of a three- or four-year competitive window with the new core led by Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis, two players much more veteran than Doncic. And with a complicated injury history. In a cruel reminder, Davis only played one game with the Mavs and couldn’t finish it due to a complicated groin injury from which he still hasn’t recovered, more than a month later. And Kyrie suffered a torn ACL in his knee that has kept him out this season and jeopardizes his on-court status next season. A disaster.

A plague of injuries rarely seen before

Furthermore, the plague of injuries has spread and reached levels rarely seen in the NBA: Daniel Gafford, Derek Lively II, PJ Washington, Jaden Hardy, Jaden Hardy, Dante Exum, Olivier Maxence-Prosper, Kai Jones… all fell off the team (before or after the trade), while others like Dwight Powell and Caleb Martin, who arrived injured in February in another bad trade for Harrison, got rid of Quentin Grimes, a shooting guard who is now shining with the Philadelphia 76ers, came and went.

So, not only have the Mavs had no chance of staying competitive and selling a modicum of hope, if that’s even possible with their fan base in a civil war-torn climate. Things have escalated to the worst possible scenario, and from there to an even more infamous one. To the point that the team is at risk of becoming the first in history to miss a regular-season game. That requires having eight players available, and Jason Kidd has ended some nights unable to make substitutions in the final minutes and with exactly eight, some of them limping.

Teams normally resort to emergency backups if they find themselves in a difficult situation due to injuries, but the Mavs are entering dramatic territory because they can’t resort to minimum and temporary contracts either. And their two-way players (Brandon Williams, Kai Jones, Kessler Edwards) are running out of NBA games. These types of contracts, which straddle the first competition and the development league, do not allow more than 50 appearances in the regular season if the contract is not converted into a standard one, something that the Mavs cannot do either. Jones, because he is injured, still has eleven available. Edwards only two and Williams, five. And the Mavs have another thirteen games ahead of them (they are 33-36, about to lose the play-in spot), the first tonight against the Pacers.

The Mavs can’t sign temporary or ten-day contracts, nor can they convert two-way contracts into standard contracts, because they’re only $51,148 below the roster spending limit established in the first apron ($178 million). And, according to the new agreement, they can’t exceed it and comply with the fines and penalties that entail because they made sign-and-trade agreements to sign Klay Thompson and Naji Marshall, in the summer and when they logically felt like contenders for the Western Conference title (they still occupy that throne).

That puts their spending ceiling (in a hard cap version: they can’t exceed it by even a dollar in any way) at that threshold of the first apron. The prorated floor for contracts, even the lowest temporary ones, is still higher than $51,148, so the Mavs are stuck even though they have an open roster spot. By the time they can sign players, it will be April 10, and they’ll only have two regular-season games left.

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After the fateful transfer window, which saw them emerge without Luka Doncic, the Mavs had a margin of just $171,000, but they spent a significant chunk of it on Moses Brown’s temporary contracts. And now, in the midst of a social divide and constantly under fire from all quarters for their bizarre management, they are forced to consider bringing together at least eight players each night to avoid another unprecedented disaster.

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