It appears the 2025-26 basketball season is over after just seven games for third-year Dallas Mavericks’ center Dereck Lively II.
ESPN’s Shams Charania reported late Wednesday morning that Lively will undergo a season-ending procedure on his right foot “to address lingering discomfort.”
The phrase “lingering discomfort” is an apt one, not just for the sensation pulsing through Lively’s right foot, but also for the general Mavs’ fan experience in 2025.
After playing 55 games in his rookie season, that
number has decreased in each of the last two. The big man out of Duke played just 36 games last year, and now it’s fair to question whether Lively’s body will let him make the impact his potential shows he can over the course of an NBA career. He has now played in just 98 of 185 possible games through three seasons, averaging 8.8 points, 7.0 rebounds and 1.5 blocked shots per game.
The Mavericks had previously announced on Tuesday, Dec. 2, that Lively was experiencing swelling and discomfort in his surgically repaired foot and would be reevaluated in seven to 10 days. Two days later, the team released a statement saying that Lively would seek opinions from multiple physicians on next steps concerning discomfort and swelling in his right foot.
Lively previously had surgery on his right foot in July, to clean out bone spurs, which followed a stress fracture in his right ankle that he dealt with last season. That stress fracture was identified by team staff after Lively ramped up his training regimen in an attempt to come back from an earlier injury, which was misidentified as an ankle sprain.
So, yeah, it’d be easy to view Lively’s continued struggle to get on the court as one more little parting gift from the Nico Harrison administration.
Lively missed nine games earlier this season with a sprained right knee. He returned for four games, playing on a minutes restriction in each of those four. He sat on the second night of a back-to-back set, a 102-96 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, with right knee injury management listed on the team injury report. That changed to “right foot injury management” for the next game, a 106-102 loss to the Miami Heat, on Nov. 24.
It all leads one to believe that the Mavericks’ staff either didn’t know enough about the injury or was trying to obfuscate because of the previous medical staff’s gross incompetence. So, either incompetence or incompetence in a different flavor.
Lively plays with such joy when he’s healthy and fully mobile. He’s so exciting to watch. It’s such a shame this is how his season is ending.
Don’t lose sight of the fact that Lively has just one more year on his 4-year, $22-million rookie contract. It remains to be seen how much the Mavericks will offer the center when he hits restricted free agency. Could his injury history lead the team to let Lively walk after next season, after two different sets of medical staff under Harrison failed him?
