We polled the Mavs Moneyball readership a couple of weeks back on how many games the readership expected Dereck Lively II to play in 2026-27, a year removed from a lost season of just seven games.
I was shocked at how many of you answered “zero” and seemed to mean it.
If Lively plays zero games this year, keeping him around for the promise of “next year” after two straight full seasons lost would seem like a fool’s errand.
But perhaps you were wise to keep your expectations at a minimum. After all,
our Feed post came roughly a month after Lively himself admitted, on June 26, that he’s “not able to run and jump yet” and that he’s “taking my time… more time than I need to make sure that I don’t have to deal with this foot again.”
Those were not inspiring words at the time. Lively played his final game of the 2025-26 season on Nov. 21 last year against the New Orleans Pelicans, in what ended as a 118-115 win. The team announced Lively’s season-ending surgery on Dec. 10 after persistent discomfort and swelling dogged his recovery.
So what do these photos of Lively working out on campus at Duke, where he played his lone season of college basketball, as part of this year’s Brotherhood offseason sessions, mean? Lively certainly appears to have put in some upper-body work while his right foot has been out of commission.
Sure, the photos of Lively from last weekend are still images. He’s not featured in the scrimmage highlights that the Duke social media team has put out there, like his teammates Kyrie Irving and Cooper Flagg are. He’s still not ready for that kind of run, which, yes, still gives massive doubt as to whether and when he’ll be able to return to full-speed action on an NBA court any time soon.
But we’re searching. We’re seekers. We’re searching for any signs of optimism in Lively’s recovery arc here. And we’re finding it at the Gun Show. He looks absolutely yoked, relative at least to the skinny, athletic youngster we knew him as when he last consistently gave the Mavs any real minutes.
We love to see it. They put a little more wind in our sails as the offseason begins to feel more and more like the preseason.
Irving and Lively are our last link to that recent iteration of the Mavericks that made fans feel anything at all. We need to see them contributing to something worthwhile on the basketball court, if only for our own sanity at this point.
The next hopeful signal from the Mavericks’ front office or coaching staff concerning Lively’s recovery from the foot injury will be the first. We don’t expect him to be ready to go when the season starts on October 21 at the Houston Rockets, which is just over a month from now, by the way.
But we need to see more from Lively in relatively short order, and these recent photos are the only thing delivering at the moment. There’s literally more of him, get it? Because of all the added muscle?
I’ll show myself out.
