Dereck Lively is out indefinitely with a foot injury. He is not cleared for camp, he missed Friday’s game against Houston, and Dallas has not put a date on anything.
He is 22 years old and he has played seven NBA games in the last year.
The Numbers Are Alarming
In 2025-26 Lively appeared in seven games, averaging 4.3 points, 5.3 rebounds, 1.9 assists and 1.6 blocks in 16.4 minutes. He had right foot surgery in December. Now, ten months later, he is still not running.
Mavericks president Masai Ujiri says Lively has progressed to shooting and is working toward running. Read that sequence carefully. Shooting is the stage before running, which is the stage before contact, which is the stage before practice, which is the stage before games.
That is a long runway, and nobody in Dallas is pretending otherwise. Regular-season availability is still an open question.
Foot Injuries Are the Ones That Scare You
Big men and feet have a long and ugly history together. The weight of a seven-footer on a surgically repaired foot is a load that does not forgive shortcuts, and the recovery curve is never linear.
Dallas says it will be patient, which is the only responsible position. A rushed return for a 22-year-old center is how a franchise turns a recoverable injury into a career that never gets going.
The frustrating part is that patience costs this team something right now. Dallas has a frontcourt that needs a rim protector, and Lively was supposed to be that for the next decade.
The Timing Matters More Than Usual
This is the season Dallas is building around Cooper Flagg. The whole organizational premise is that a young core grows together, learns each other’s tendencies, and arrives as a contender in two or three years.
Lively is supposed to be part of that core. Instead he has spent the formative stretch of it in a rehab room. Chemistry does not develop on a training table, and the reps he is missing are not recoverable later.
The honest read is that Dallas should plan this season without him and treat any contribution as a bonus. Two years of availability data point in one direction, and hoping for a December return is how teams end up adjusting rotations in February.
Lively is young enough that none of this has to define him. But at some point the question stops being when he comes back and starts being whether his body will hold up for an 82-game season at all. Dallas is not there yet. It is closer than it was a year ago.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
