The Dallas Mavericks waived center Dwight Powell on Monday, and barring a surprise reunion somewhere down the road, that closes the book on one of the stranger survival stories in recent NBA roster-building. Twelve years. One franchise. Through coaching changes, through a Finals run, through the single biggest trade of the Doncic era, Powell was still there. Monday, he wasn't.
Powell was never the story in Dallas. That was the point. He was a screen-setter, a rim-runner, a guy who made the actual stars' jobs a little easier and asked for nothing in return. Players like that usually get traded, not kept, once a roster churns through a decade of transactions. Powell got kept. He outlasted teammates, outlasted front-office regimes, and was still wearing the uniform when the Mavericks made the 2024 NBA Finals, the deepest the franchise has gone since its title run under Dirk Nowitzki. He was also still there a year ago this winter, when Dallas traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers, a move that reshaped the roster around him and, as it turns out, bought him about one more season before the number finally came up.
That's the almanac beat worth sitting with for a second: rosters get rebuilt in big, loud trades. Guys like Powell are the quiet constant underneath all of it, right up until they aren't. Twelve years is a long time to be the answer to a trivia question nobody's asked yet. Somebody in that locker room arrived in Dallas after Powell had already been there for most of a decade.
What comes next is the ordinary, slightly sad mechanics of the league in October. Powell becomes a free agent and will look for a landing spot, probably as a depth big who can still set a screen and protect a rim for minutes, the exact role he's played his whole career. The Mavericks keep building out the frontcourt around him gone, and open their regular season against Houston on Wednesday night, a new roster taking the floor without the one name that had been a constant since before most of it arrived.