The $3.88 Million Paradox: How the Dallas Mavericks Are Trying to Keep Dwight Powell

Before the Dallas Mavericks answer the question "how do we keep Dwight Powell?", they face a paradox: the most movable salaries belong to the three players the front office most wants to keep. Marc Stein of The Stein Line has reported that Dallas will make a serious effort to keep Powell on the active roster. Powell, 35, has signed a one-year, $3.88 million contract. The issue is not quality, but quantity: Dallas has 15 players on standard contracts. To activate Powell's deal, they need to clear a roster spot. According to Stein, the names with the most tradeable contracts are Tarık Biberovic, Marcus Sasser and Moussa Cisse. The detail that made me pause is Stein's claim: the front office badly wants to keep all three. In other words, the players most likely to be traded are the ones they least want to lose. This is the structure of a roster puzzle that conventional statistics cannot explain. Biberovic arrived from Fenerbahçe after eight years in Turkey, recently earned MVP honors in the Turkish Cup final, and was selected 56th overall in the 2026 NBA Draft. Sasser joined from the Detroit Pistons in July, averaging 5.2 points and 2.0 assists last season. Cisse is a young big man whom Dallas had to match an offer sheet from the New York Knicks to keep, finishing the 2026-26 season with 4.5 points and 5.7 rebounds. If you look only at the numbers, Powell seems the easiest player to sacrifice: 6.5 points and 4.3 rebounds in 763 games. But basketball is not built by adding up points. I have spent several seasons watching how the Mavericks attack, and I recognize Powell as one of those rare bigs who can create spacing without needing the ball. He steps up to set screens, times his roll well, dives into the middle for dunks, then retreats on defense in silence. Dallas's offense relies on space; a player who knows how to sacrifice helps the ballhandler breathe. But that is also the curse. When an aging player is valued for "adaptability," management tends to forget the future. Biberovic, Sasser and Cisse do not have eye-popping stats, but they represent what Dallas needs over the next three years: energy, depth and contract flexibility. Keeping Powell another year means putting one upcoming season on the scale against the material for the post-star era. Something I have learned after years of watching the NBA: every result is a deliberate lie. Powell's $3.88 million contract does not describe his actual value; it describes Dallas's unwillingness to say goodbye to a locker-room icon. In contrast, the 5.2 points or 4.5 rebounds from Sasser and Cisse are a reverse lie: they do not show what these players could become in a better environment. Among those three, Cisse is the one I find most interesting. Matching the Knicks' offer sheet was not an impulsive move. With a young big who can protect the rim and run the floor, the team can rotate without overloading Powell's minutes. But right now, everything sits with the front office: can they be clear-eyed enough to separate emotion from decision? Basketball never ends with the buzzer; it ends with a question. This summer, the question for Dallas is not "how do we keep Powell?" but "after Powell, who will carry the team's culture?" If the answer lies in one of those young names, everything becomes clear. If Dallas chooses to keep a 35-year-old center by sacrificing the future, they are only buying time, not sustainability. The winning machine is only an illusion until someone is willing to break it. A team's reach is not found on the court; it lives in the quiet decisions backstage. Dallas will have to show which side they stand on.