Knicks likely shut out of 2023 NBA Draft following Mavericks’ late-season collapse

The New York Knicks are set up for the future with a plethora of first-round draft picks to use for trades or to add young, intriguing talent to the roster. Unfortunately, it appears they won’t get to use picks of any kind this year after the Dallas Mavericks completed their tank job with a 138-117 loss to the Spurs on Sunday. 

As we reported last week, the Mavericks falling out of the play-in tournament would impact the Knicks’ plans on NBA Draft night since Dallas owes its first-round pick to the Knicks if it falls between picks 11 and 30 as part of the final piece from the original Kristaps Porzingis trade. 

However, if Dallas finished with one of the ten worst records in the league, then the chances of the pick being transferred to the Knicks shifted drastically. As reported by CBS Sports, “The 10th-worst record has a 77.5% chance of getting a top-10 pick in the lottery, while the 11th-worst record has just an 11.6% chance of doing so.”

On Friday night, Dallas made it clear that they were not going to try to get into the play-in tournament but instead were going to prioritize keeping their own draft pick. Before Friday’s loss to the Chicago Bulls they made a “managerial decision” to rest a few “injured players.”

However, Dallas’ decision-making, while not uncommon in the NBA, was not handled particularly well and has caused the NBA to open an investigation into their tanking practices. 

By league rules, “Teams are prohibited from resting healthy players for any high-profile, nationally televised game…Absent unusual circumstances, a team should not rest multiple healthy players for the same game… Absent unusual circumstances, teams should not rest healthy players when playing on the road.”

While the rules are loose and easy for teams to avoid, comments from Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd before the game made it seems clear that Dallas was not resting players due to injury because due to the team’s strategic decision.  

Jason Kidd on Luka Doncic: “He’s going to play the first quarter and then he’s done for the season.”

Kidd then backed off the “for the season” declaration a bit, but that’s the plan.

— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) April 7, 2023

The fact that it was a plan prior to the start of the game for Luka Doncic to play only one quarter made it clear that Doncic wasn’t injured, but then Kidd also said, “We were gonna play until told otherwise. And today is the day that we’ve been told that we’re gonna do something different.”

The wording makes it obvious that Kidd and Doncic were “told” by management that he wasn’t going to play beyond the first quarter or on Sunday. The intention behind the move was clearly for Dallas to not be competitive and to lose the final two games so that they could secure the tenth-worst record in the NBA. 

As a result, they will now have a 65.9% chance to finish with the 10th pick, according to Tankathon. Dallas also has a 79.8% chance to keep its own pick, which means that the Knicks have just a 20.2% chance of getting the Mavs’ first-round pick. Since the Knicks don’t have any second-round picks this year and traded their own first-round pick to Portland for Josh Hart, that means the Knicks would have no picks in the 2023 NBA Draft.  

The Mavericks pick would now transfer to become a 2024 first-round pick, where it would also remain top-10 protected. 

However, the Knicks would appear to have better odds at having the pick sent to them next year since Marc Stein, reported in his Substack that the plan for Dallas is to “explore trade prospects” in order to pursue win-now talent.

“Retaining this June’s pick would provide a crucial potential path to a quality player for a club low on trade chips or the salary-cap flexibility to make significant changes around Doncic and Irving,” Stein wrote. “Sources say that the Mavericks plan to explore trade prospects with the pick if they retain it to potentially seek more win-now talent.”

If the Mavericks were to add even more win-now talent, then the chances of them finishing in the bottom ten next year would seem highly unlikely. However, it also appeared highly unlikely when they traded for Kyrie Irving just a couple of months ago, so the Knicks will just have to wait and see when the final piece of the Porzingis trade finally heads their way. 

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