The Mavericks 2023-24 season was a wildly entertaining and successful one, full stop. The roster was remade, the pains of watching Luka Dončić sit out the end of last season in a tanking effort were erased, and a new brand of basketball arrived. The once-derided trade for Kyrie Irving paid dividends; his partnership with Dončić now validated and solidified. And for once, the roster is composed mostly of players still in their prime and under contract for next season. The franchise hasn’t been in this position in quite some time.
Only one key member of this remade roster is a free agent. Last summer, Derrick Jones Jr. declined a player option with the Chicago Bulls and signed a veteran minimum contract in Dallas that paid him almost $1 million less than what he would have earned in Chicago. He bet on himself (and on the prospects of playing with Dončić), and it paid off. After what he showed in Dallas, he’s going to land a contract several orders larger than anything he has ever made. The question isn’t whether the Mavericks want to be the team to make him that wealthy, given general manager Nico Harrison telling the media last week that retaining Jones is “priority one, 1A, and 1B.” It’s whether they should.
Make no mistake, Jones was indispensable this year for Dallas. He started 66 games, the most of his eight-year career by a significant amount. He shot his highest volume and best percentage from three. And he’s still only 27. The starting lineup Dallas settled into after the trade deadline with Jones, Dončić, Irving, P.J. Washington Jr., and Daniel Gafford posted a plus-15.9 points per possession net rating, ranking in the 82nd percentile in the regular season. It was an elite unit. Jones posted the three best scoring performances of his postseason career in the back half of the Oklahoma City series, and Dallas most likely doesn’t advance past the second round without him doing what he did. He takes turns with Washington in guarding the opposition’s best scorer.
But Jones also didn’t give Dallas much in the Finals. He played just 15 minutes in the Game 3 loss, and it felt as if coach Jason Kidd had lost a little faith in him. And while he did shoot a career-best mark from three-point range, 34.3 percent isn’t much to write home about in a league where spacing is always a valuable commodity.
Does all of that make him worth a deal at the mid-level exception? That’s the sort of money another team will likely be willing to offer Jones after the season he turned in, and right now, the Mavs don’t have the cap room to do so themselves. There are a few ways Dallas could go about getting there—Mavs Moneyball has a great, detailed breakdown of the options—but the most obvious one would be shedding Tim Hardaway Jr.’s expiring deal, and Marc Stein reports the Pistons might be a taker. This would allow Dallas to offer Jones the full mid-level for four years, but it would sacrifice a contract that the Mavericks could possibly use to take back a veteran on longer money on a different team or package with draft picks and young players to take a swing at a player with higher upside than Jones provides.
The worry for Dallas would be some form of regression that leaves the team stuck with a player who doesn’t “impact winning.” Jones is not the type of player you can pay a hefty sum and have him come off the bench; that designation is typically reserved for scorers, and Jones will never be one. If he’s here, he needs to start, and help take the defensive load off of Dončić and Irving.
The good news is I don’t see why his ability to do so would wane anytime soon. Defense isn’t typically subject to flukiness like offense can be. I’m not a huge fan of individual defensive statistics, but on shots where Jones was the closest defender, he graded out at an elite level on impacting the result of that attempt. And he did this while defending scoring ball handlers at the highest rate in the league this year. If the Mavericks were to lose Jones this offseason, they would be looking for another player exactly like him as a replacement.
Offensively, Jones’ career-best year didn’t come from him outperforming his expected shot quality. I don’t expect his offense to take a massive hit in the next few seasons, because frankly, there isn’t a whole lot dependably there to begin with outside of those insane highlight-reel dunks. But perhaps there is a chance for another smidgen more growth in the shot if he continues to get open looks created by Dončić.
Ultimately, the question of what to do with Jones is really a question about how the Mavericks want to build and grow during the Dončić era. Irving is only under contract for another season and could opt out after that. (He most likely won’t, but even then, he would be an unrestricted free agent in two seasons.) A Jones deal would probably be three or four years, which would line up for at least half of the contract to see him starting alongside Irving and Dončić. And that’s what this is about. Maybe Dončić continues to grow as a defender, building on the steps he took this season. But he’s never going to be able to consistently guard the opposition’s best, second-best, or third-best scorer. Same goes for Irving. So there is a premium placed on players like Jones for this version of the Mavericks.
It could be a scary proposition to invest in a player such as Jones, especially coming off of the experience of watching Hardaway eat up a significant portion of the cap only to abruptly become unplayable. But I think the situation with Jones is different. He fits so well with Irving and Dončić that I think the club has to do what it can to keep him. It may not be able to. But I would rather let Jones make that decision than the team make it for him.
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