‘Never Seen This’: The Mavs Are Running Out of Players

The Dallas Mavericks are running out of players, and they might not be able to add any more.

The team entered Sunday’s game against Phoenix with nine available players, one more than the league minimum, and finished it with seven. 

A collision between Dwight Powell and Kessler Edwards took both out of the game causing coach Jason Kidd to make his final substitution with six minutes left in the fourth quarter, which is virtually unheard of. Phoenix won 125–116. Edwards returned to the game, while Powell didn’t, but is expected to play Monday against San Antonio. The situation left the Mavericks with just one player taller than 6-foot-6 in Naji Marshall.

“Never seen this,” Jason Kidd, the Mavericks head coach said after the game. “Never been in a game where we could not take someone out to rest them because we had no one to put in.”

Powell is expected to play Monday, which would give the Mavericks the league minimum to avoid forfeit, but the team’s options to bring in players are limited. 

The situation is a byproduct of both the team’s terrible injury bug and the league’s new collective bargaining agreement.

The Mavericks have faced significant injuries since trading Luka Dončić to the Lakers in a February stunner. Anthony Davis, the key return in the trade, got injured in his first game with the team and Kyrie Irving went down last week with an ACL tear. They are part of an extensive inactive list that includes Daniel Gafford (right knee sprain), Jaden Hardy (right ankle sprain), Kai Jones (left quad strain), Dereck Lively II (right ankle stress fracture), Olivier-Maxence Prosper (right wrist sprain), and P.J. Washington (right ankle sprain).

None of those players will be back Monday. While the Mavericks are eligible to apply for multiple hardship waivers and have an open roster spot, the team’s salary cap situation has them hard-capped, preventing them from doing so. The Mavs are just $51,148 beneath the CBA’s first apron, which is too cheap to sign a player to a 10-day contract that pays roughly $120,000. 

“We can’t sign anybody,” Kidd said after Sunday’s game. 

Kidd, who is a Hall of Fame point guard, joked that he and assistant coach Jared Dudley, a fellow NBA veteran, were “too expensive” to be signed to the roster and give the team some minutes. 

This past offseason, the team acquired Klay Thompson in a sign-and-trade from the Warriors, which hard-capped them to the $178 million first apron line after sending out salary in a trade. 

After the deadline, the Mavericks were just $171,000 below the first apron after trading for Davis and Caleb Martin in what was supposed to be another deep playoff run after making the NBA Finals a year ago. The team got Davis to waive his $5.9 million trade kicker, which gave them cap flexibility, but not Martin’s, which was $1 million. Had Martin waived his, the Mavs would have enough cap flexibility to sign more players. 

Martin made his Mavericks debut on Sunday after battling a hip injury with the Sixers before he was traded. He played on a minutes restriction, which was part of Kidd’s short bench. 

The Mavericks are hamstrung with their two-way players, too, as the deadline to sign players to one for the rest of the season was March 4. The Mavericks could have converted Edwards to a standard NBA deal, but now they may have to wait until the offseason. Two-way players can only be active for a maximum of 50 games in a season and Edwards has been active for 44 meaning he may run out by next week. 

Two-way players aren’t eligible for postseason play, but that might not be an issue for Dallas. Sunday’s loss dropped the team to 32–33, which is 10th in the Western Conference and just a game and a half ahead of the 11th-place Suns, who now own the tiebreaker over them. 

Injuries to Davis and Gafford prompted the team to sign Moses Brown to a 10-day contract in February, which expired March 1, leaving the remaining $51,148 below the apron, roughly $70,000 short of the space needed for another 10-day contract. 

Brown played well in his short stint, but was too expensive to be re-signed to another 10-day deal. His six NBA seasons exceed the four-year maximum to qualify for a two-way contract, too. The Mavericks now can’t sign another player to a standard contract until April 10, which is the last day to waive a player on an expiring contract. The team has 15 games until then. Waiving a player could give the roster a fresh body–for the final two games of the season.

Kidd pushed back on the eight-player minimum and said he believes if the Mavericks had five players, they’d have to play with five, with foul-outs resulting in technical fouls.

“You’ve got to laugh or else this will drive you crazy,” Kidd said Sunday.