If you had Dallas Mavericks futures tickets sitting in your pocket like a warm little promise of playoff basketball, I need you to take them out, look at them one last time, and gently place them in the nearest dumpster fire. Because the Mavericks just officially announced that Kyrie Irving will not play a single game this season, and the 2025-26 Dallas Mavericks are, with mathematical certainty, cooked.
Kyrie tore his ACL in his left knee on March 3, 2025, against the Sacramento Kings. He was driving to the basket, got fouled by DeMar DeRozan, landed on Jonas Valanciunas's foot, and his knee hyperextended on the way down. He had ACL reconstruction surgery on March 26, and the Mavericks have been waiting ever since for their point guard to come back and save the franchise.
Well, the waiting is over. Not because he is coming back, but because the Mavericks officially announced on February 18, 2026 that Irving will miss the entire remainder of the season. His agent put out a statement about Kyrie wanting to be "completely healthy when he comes back" and "giving himself the best chance to chase a championship next season." Which is a really fancy way of saying: this team is 19-35 and there is absolutely nothing to come back to.
This is the first time in Kyrie's 15-year career that he has missed an entire season. The man who has missed time for a broken kneecap, shoulder surgery, a facial fracture, various "personal reasons," and that time he decided vaccines were a conspiracy has now added "sat out an entire year because the team was too awful to bother rehabbing faster for" to his resume.
Before the ACL tear, Irving was having a legitimately excellent season. In 50 games during 2024-25, he was putting up 24.7 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 4.6 assists on 47.3% from the field and 40.1% from three. His free throw shooting was at 91.6%. He was playing some of the best basketball of his career at 32 years old. And then his knee decided to go the way of every degenerate's bankroll: catastrophically and without warning.
Dallas is on a nine-game losing streak. That is their longest losing streak in 28 years. The last time the Mavericks lost nine straight, the internet was powered by dial-up and people were still figuring out email. Luka Doncic is gone (traded to the Lakers in February 2025). Kyrie is out for the year. The roster is a collection of guys who are trying their best and whose best is, apparently, losing nine games in a row.
They are sitting at 12th in the Western Conference, which in NBA terms is basically the Mariana Trench. There is no play-in. There is no miraculous run. There is only the draft lottery and the quiet dignity of knowing that sometimes, franchises just have to eat a year.
Let us rewind to February 2025, when the Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers. At the time, the logic was: you still have Kyrie, you have cap flexibility, you can rebuild around a different core. The Mavericks were supposed to be competitive. They were supposed to be the scrappy team that overperformed its talent level because Kyrie Irving is still Kyrie Irving, and Kyrie Irving with the ball in his hands and no other superstar to defer to was going to be appointment television.
That plan required Kyrie to actually play basketball. Instead, his knee exploded two weeks after the trade, and the Mavericks have spent the entire 2025-26 season as a team with no stars, no direction, and no reason for anyone to watch. They traded their franchise cornerstone and then lost the other one to an ACL tear. That is not a rebuild. That is a demolition.
If you placed a Dallas Mavericks futures bet before the season, congratulations. You now own the most expensive piece of abstract art in your wallet. It represents hope, stupidity, and the fundamental human inability to account for the fact that knees are made of tissue paper and bad intentions.
The Mavericks opened the season with Western Conference playoff odds that some books had around +2000. Not great, but not insane for a team with Kyrie Irving theoretically returning at some point. Those odds are now effectively infinity. You would have better returns setting your money on fire and collecting the insurance.
If you bet Mavericks futures, you are cooked. If you bet on any team's futures, you are one freak injury, one bad landing, one awkward step on somebody's foot away from watching your ticket turn into confetti. This sport does not care about your feelings, your research, or your "lock of the year." It cares about ligaments, and ligaments are the most unreliable thing in the universe next to a parlay.
Kyrie will be back next year. He will be 34 years old. The Mavericks will have cap space and draft picks and a plan. And some degenerate, somewhere, is going to look at those preseason odds and think, "You know what, this is the year Dallas puts it together." And we will all end up right back here, reading another obituary for another futures ticket, wondering why we ever trusted a knee to hold up an entire franchise's hopes.
Welcome to degeneracy. The house always wins, and the knees always lose.