Why Kyrie Irving isn’t playing for Mavericks with potential injury return timeline

Published on 23 Oct at 1:17 am

Why Kyrie Irving isn’t playing for Mavericks with potential injury return timeline originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Dallas Mavericks have a point guard question.

The reason for that? Kyrie Irving’s long-term injury.

Eventually, the Mavs will get Irving back and he’ll take back his role as the 1 in their offense.

But until then, Dallas has to decide how much to use new signing D’Angelo Russell as the point guard, or whether to take the training wheels off No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg and let him just run the show.

The season starts with this question Wednesday night when the Mavs take on the San Antonio Spurs in a nationally televised game. Everyone will get to see how head coach Jason Kidd opts to handle things out of the gate with Irving on the sideline.

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Why isn’t Kyrie Irving playing?

Kyrie Irving isn’t playing because he’s still out for months with an injury.

Irving tore his ACL on March 3, 2025.

He won’t be back onto the court until sometime in 2026.

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Irving has previously said, on a Twitch streamthat “there’s no timetable for when I’m coming back.”

ACL injuries have classically been viewed as taking 12 months to come back from, so if that was the case, Irving would be back in March 2026, which would still give a month before the playoffs began to get up to speed and help the Mavs ramp up to make a run.

Some athletes more recently, both in basketball and football, have made it back closer to nine months on an ACL tear. At Irving’s age, he’ll probably be a bit cautious, but it does seem safe to expect Irving to play at some point in the 2025-26 NBA season, just not in the early going.