The Dallas Mavericks had CVS receipt full of problems throughout the 2025-26 season. Naji Marshall wasn’t one of them.
Sure, his 3-point shooting in his first two years with the Mavericks (27.5%, 29.1%) hasn’t been what it was in 2023-24 (38.7%), his final year with the New Orleans Pelicans. And sure, his on-ball defense has been a little less than advertised since his arrival in Dallas.
But you’d have to get pretty far down that laundry list of Mavs grievances before airing any dirt about the kind
of player Marshall is. He had a second-straight career-high scoring mark this year for the Mavericks, averaging 15.2 points on just over 11 shots a game. He got to the basket at will again. When Marshall gets a head of steam either on the break or as the trail man in secondary transition, you know where he’s going and the result is all but set in stone.
Season in review
Marshall was the Mavericks’ de facto second scoring option all season long. That does not need to be his role. If Marshall is your best player off the bench, you’re probably a contender in your conference. If Marshall is your second-best basketball player, that’s a recipe for winning 26 games. None of this should take anything away from the two seasons of steady production Dallas has gotten out of Marshall in his first two years of his 3-year, $27 million contract.
He was efficient, scoring on better than 67% of his scoring chances within five feet of the basket. His weaknesses don’t become glaring problems for the team. He turned the ball over just 1.6 times in just over 29 minutes per game.
Marshall scored 31 or more points three times in February. Correlation is not causality, but it’s more than coincidence that the Mavericks lost all three of those games. If you’re depending on Marshall to lead your team to victory, it’s probably not a very good team. Sometimes you need someone to bully his way to the basket to end an opponent’s run or to fuel the fire for a run of your own. But playing bully-ball on the way to the rack and trading twos for threes is not conducive to winning in today’s NBA.
Still, Marshall’s rough-and-tumble brand of production was a net positive for a Mavericks team pockmarked with net negatives throughout the roster. He had six 30-point games this season, a year after notching his first two 30-point games late in the 2024-25 campaign. He’s comfortable going and getting a bucket when his team needs it — the problem is how many times this team asked him to bail them out.
Shot creation was a glaring problem for the Mavericks in 2025-26, forcing Marshall to shoulder a heavier load than his game warrants.
Best game
Marshall came within two points of his career-high scoring mark on Feb. 26 in a 130-121 loss to the Sacramento Kings. He scored 36 points on 14-of-23 shooting, grabbed 10 rebounds and dished six assists in the loss, assuming the role of primary creator during that eight-game stretch when Cooper Flagg was out with a foot injury.
Contract status
Marshall enters the third and final year of his 3-year, $27 million contract in 2026-27. He’ll take up just over five percent of the Mavericks’ salary cap next year. He’s been nothing short of a steal for the Mavericks. His name was bandied about in the run-up to February’s trade deadline, but the Mavericks’ asking price for Marshall was reportedly a first-round draft pick, and nobody bit.
Looking ahead
As with so many current Mavericks, it’s hard to read the tea leaves as to Marshall’s future with the club. Fans have come to love his grit and his willingness to earn ugly buckets and finish through contact, but he may be as valuable to the Mavs in an offseason trade as he would be on the roster for the long term.
Dallas needs guards and has forwards to spare at this point. It’s easy to see a future where either Marshall or P.J. Washington is on another team soon. If Marshall is back next year, it’d be good to see him leading the second unit instead of being depended on to the level the Mavs leaned on him this season.
