Almost a decade before his name became attached to a Dallas rebuild, Kyrie Irving’s college career lasted precisely 11 games. A serious injury to the ligaments in his right toe, suffered against Butler in December 2010, sidelined him for most of his lone season at Duke, and it still didn’t stop teams from making him the No. 1 pick in the 2011 draft. Now 34 and working his way back from a torn ACL, Irving finds himself in a strange déjà vu, watching Dallas build its next era around another Duke product who arrived, like him, as the top overall pick. His name is Cooper Flagg. He’s 19, and increasingly, the word prodigy undersells him.
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The situation recently surfaced on ESPN’s NBA Today. Tim MacMahon said, “Question that’s being asked around the league is how long. For how long is this fit with Kyrie and the Mavericks,” addressing the growing question surrounding Irving’s place.
Tim continued: “It’s not because the Mavericks don’t love Kyrie. They do. It’s not because Kyrie doesn’t love Dallas and hasn’t enjoyed his experience there… he has, but they’re building around a 19-year-old prodigy in Cooper Flagg. So could there come a time when it makes sense for both sides to find a contender for Kyrie to go to? These are the kind of things that people around the league will be monitoring leading up to the trade deadline.”
Irving tore his ACL in March 2025 and sat out the entire 2025-26 season, watching from the sideline as Flagg won Rookie of the Year, averaging 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 4.5 assists, and becoming the first player since Michael Jordan in 1984-85 to lead his team in all four major statistical categories.
Thankfully for Dallas, they landed him despite just a 1.8 percent shot at the top pick in the lottery, and the front office that made that pick no longer runs the team. General manager Nico Harrison, architect of the Luka Dončić trade, was fired in November 2025. Head coach Jason Kidd followed him out the door in May 2026, replaced weeks later by Dusty May, fresh off a national championship at Michigan. Running the operation now is Masai Ujiri, the former Toronto Raptors executive hired as Dallas’ president in May 2026.
It goes without saying that with a fresh front office comes fresh anxiety. And sitting on the same panel, another insider, Marc Spears, added another intriguing layer to the discussion by bringing Ujiri into the equation.
“Masai also has a really good relationship, as you mentioned, with Kyrie Irving. I think it’s the kind of relationship where if Kyrie says, hey, Masai, like, this isn’t for me, I think they could work together to get something done; I don’t think it would be something ugly,” Spears said. “I think there would be interest in Kyrie if he’s as healthy as he looks.”
Irving is entering his mid-30s, while Flagg is only 19. Dallas therefore has to balance Kyrie Irving’s desire to compete for another championship with the need to construct a roster that can grow alongside its teenage franchise centerpiece. The answer to that for some rival teams is that Irving simply isn’t the long-term solution.
However, there is no indication that Dallas is preparing such a move right now.
The front office has made it clear that they wish to start the season with the veteran, but as Marc Stein of The Stein Line reported: “Rival teams, however, continue to wonder aloud about how firmly Dallas will stick to that stance once the season begins and the next in-season trade deadline on Feb. 11 gradually approaches.”
Adding to that, Ujiri has not signaled any urgency to move Irving. He described “huge curiosity in our minds to see how Kyrie fits playing with Cooper Flagg” when he met reporters in May, crediting Kevin Durant with the observation that there’s simply no one else quite like Irving in the league. Irving isn’t a pending free agent, either. He signed a three-year, $119 million extension in June 2025 that runs through 2026-27 with a player option for 2027-28.
For now, both sides appear to be pursuing the version where it works. Irving spent the offseason organizing pickup runs and a minicamp with Flagg and other Mavericks teammates in Los Angeles. Whether that on-court chemistry survives is a question nobody in Dallas can answer yet.