OMG LOL. The Mavericks Are One of the NBA's 'Luckiest' Teams, Study Says

There’s zero chance any Dallas Mavericks fan felt their favorite NBA team was lucky when taking in yet another brain-dulling Nico Harrison press conference on Monday.

The embattled Mavs’ general manager sat in front of a throng of reporters after his team was mercifully bounced out of the league’s “play-in” postseason round and repeated many of the same incomprehensible talking points he’s been mindlessly repeating since he traded transcendent team superstar Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 1, a move that continues to dumfound sports fans and experts from around the globe.

“Defense wins championships,” “I lead with faith, not fear,” and other empty cliches took center stage when all of us only really wanted to hear “I was wrong” or perhaps “I resign effective immediately.”

Many knowledgeable league observers suggest no team in NBA history, and all of American pro sports, has experienced as horrendous a fall from grace in such a short period of time as the 2024-25 Mavericks have. Not only did the team lose its top star in the trade, but catastrophic injuries, especially to all-star Kyrie Irving, ensured that Dallas would be a shell of a team for the remainder of the season.

Add to that an injury to Anthony Davis, the player Harrison swapped for Doncic, during his first game in Dallas, kept him out for weeks. That was followed by a litany of PR missteps by Harrison, team owner Patrick Dumont and former majority owner Mark Cuban, which only served to bury Mavs fans further under the depressing mud of a wasted season.

But, hey! A new study by sports gambling site Action Network says that the Dallas Mavericks are, get this, one of the luckiest damn teams in the NBA.


To be fair to Action Network, the study is a pretty straightforward statistical compilation of the teams with the most buzzer-beating, game-winning shots since the 2020-21 season, and not a deep dive into some hard-to-define, nebulous idea of what “lucky” could mean.

But come on, even in this objective, math-forward list, it’s not hard to see just how unlucky Mavericks fans are. (We have difficulty saying the team is unlucky since its GM and owner brought so much of this year’s pain upon themselves.)

So, let’s play along for a moment: sure, the Mavs rank fourth in the league in buzzer-beating game-winning shots since 2020-21 with six. A total of six games in which a heroic shot snatched victory from the jaws of defeat is pretty great. And by the way, that’s not luck, but we digress.

Of course, Mavs fans and Nico Harrison know that Doncic was responsible for some of those dramatic buzzer-beaters, and we all know that Dallas didn’t have one this season after Doncic became a Laker, so how’s that for luck, Action Network?

At this point, there are still some Mavs fans left, and we suppose they hope the team gets lucky when the order for the upcoming NBA draft is determined, but we’re not holding our breath. If the Mavericks are one of the league’s luckiest teams, we don't want to know what unlucky looks like.