{"id":614378,"date":"2026-02-20T20:33:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T20:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/614378\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T20:33:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T20:33:14","slug":"nba-lottery-watch-the-mavericks-start-the-rebuild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/614378\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA Lottery Watch: the Mavericks start the rebuild"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dallas Mavericks are in the home stretch, fully in rebuild mode for the final 28 games of their season. For the last few years at MMB we\u2019ve wrapped up each week with a quick glance at the Power Rankings among national outlets to see how they view the Mavericks from week to week. That, for now, is not necessary. The Mavericks aren\u2019t playing meaningful basketball, not for the playoffs. Instead their meaningful basketball centers solely on the development of Cooper Flagg and the other young players in the rotation. They announced this week that Kyrie Irving will continue rehab and will not return until next season<\/a>. Now the team gets reps for the young guys, and organically position themselves as best they can for the NBA Draft lottery draw. Don\u2019t call it a tank! (you can call it a tank). Development matters first, getting good reps for the young guys while letting the wins and losses fall as they may.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a look at where the Mavericks are as of this writing, and what happens next.<\/p>\n

The Mavericks (currently 19-35) are seventh in the lottery standings, two games back of the Utah Jazz in sixth and 8.5 games back of the Sacramento Kings. The Memphis Grizzlies are currently eighth behind Dallas \u2014 just 1.5 games back.<\/p>\n

Utah and Memphis will be teams to take a hard look at if you find yourselves scoreboard watching on any given night. All of these teams, as covered nationally at a very loud decibel, are going all in on collecting losses. The reality of Dallas \u201ccatching\u201d teams like the Washington Wizards or Brooklyn Nets in fourth or fifth is not likely \u2014 both teams are a full four games ahead of the Mavs. They\u2019re bunched up with the Indiana Pacers and New Orleans Pelicans. So expect plenty of shuffling in front of Dallas in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

If the lottery were today, the Mavericks would have a 31.9% chance at a top four pick (7.5% at the top pick). Their top four chance moves up or down a full 5% if they moved in front of Utah or behind Memphis.<\/p>\n

Each week we\u2019ll take one spin around the block at tankathon.com<\/a> and see where the chips fall. Our first inaugural spin was chaos. The Mavericks fell back one spot to eighth with the Milwaukee Bucks jumping nine spots to first \u2014 but because of a previous trade where the Atlanta Hawks get the best selection between Milwaukee and New Orleans, the Hawks are at one. The Bucks were able to then take on the New Orleans pick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dallas Mavericks are in the home stretch, fully in rebuild mode for the final 28 games of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3793],"tags":[7,686,149,4057,166,1320,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-614378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas-mavericks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-dallas-mavericks","11":"tag-dallasmavericks","12":"tag-mavericks","13":"tag-mavericks-news","14":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116104868985858305","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}