586 Days Later, Kyrie Irving Gives the Mavericks Their Ceiling Back

Two days after the Dallas Mavericks looked overmatched in a 135-117 preseason loss to Houston in Macao, they got the thing that actually matters back.

Kyrie Irving stepped onto an NBA floor Sunday for the first time in 586 days, and per ESPN's recap, he scored 17 points in Dallas' 132-115 win over the Rockets. Reports from the Mavs Moneyball recap described him beating Jabari Smith Jr. along the baseline for a reverse layup roughly 10 seconds into his first start in more than 19 months. It was a 19-month absence that began with an ACL tear on March 3, 2025 — the injury that turned an already-chaotic post-Luka Doncic season into a lost one.

The Mavericks played all of last year without him, finished 26-56, and were ranked 22nd in the final power-rating cycle of the season at -8.37 points per game on a neutral floor. That number carried a 1.99-point injury dock for Naji Marshall, P.J. Washington and Marvin Bagley III. This is a roster that had almost nothing go right.

Why this specific return matters more than most

Because of who is standing next to him. Cooper Flagg opened the preseason with 19 points in 19 minutes against Houston, and he is coming off a rookie year in which he averaged 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists across 70 games while earning Rookie of the Year and a unanimous All-Rookie First Team selection.

What Flagg did not have was a legitimate primary creator. He shot just 29.5% from three as a rookie, and too much of Dallas' offense ran through a 19-year-old learning on the job. Irving, who averaged 24.7 points and 40.1% from deep in his last full-ish season (50 games in 2024), fixes the geometry of the floor. FanSided's Mavericks site framed it well before camp: Dallas' next great duo hadn't even played together yet. Now it has.

The honest caveats

Dallas is rebuilding on the fly. Anthony Davis and D'Angelo Russell were salary-dumped at the February deadline, Nico Harrison is out as general manager, and Dusty May is a rookie NBA head coach installing a new offense with an emphasis on three-point volume. Market context reflects the uncertainty: Dallas' posted season win total sits at 34.5, and its championship odds carry an implied probability of roughly half a percent.

The injury math is thin, too. The loudest preseason warning out of Dallas was never about Irving's knee — it was that the Mavericks are one Irving injury away from another disaster because they didn't add enough guard depth behind him. The defensive issues Houston exposed in Game 1, including Alperen Şengün's triple-double, aren't erased by a healthy point guard. Neither is a frontcourt that needs Daniel Gafford and rookie Morez Johnson Jr. to keep spacing the floor as they did in the opener.

What the next two weeks tell us

Dallas hosts New Orleans on Oct. 14 and Atlanta on Oct. 16 before a road swing through Houston and Indiana. If Irving's burst and change of direction hold up through actual regular-season minutes, the Mavericks stop being a team whose season hinges on Flagg's development curve alone.

That's the real value of Sunday. Not a preseason score in Macao, but a 33-year-old guard who looks whole — and a franchise that suddenly has two reasons to believe instead of one.