Mavericks’ Kyrie Irving Suffers Left ACL Tear. Here’s What That Means

The Dallas Mavericks’ rather bizarre season just got worse. A whole lot worse. As in lose their star-point-guard-to-an-anterior-cruciate-ligament-injury worse. In a season when they’ve seen their center Dereck Lively II go down with a broken foot, traded their five-time All-NBA playmaker star, Luka Dončić, to the Los Angeles Lakers for an older Anthony Davis and then had Davis go down with an adductor muscle strain, the Mavs will now have to make do without their All-Star point guard Kyrie Irving.

Irving tore his left ACL in the first quarter of Monday’s loss to the Sacramento Kings. That means their best remaining player is out for the season, and the Mavs’ chances of making it back to the NBA Championships after doing so last year just went from not-so-good to worse.

What Is An ACL Tear?

If you Google, “what’s the worst injury a basketball player can suffer,” those three letters, ACL, come up often. That’s because the ACL plays a big role in keeping the knee stable. And you kind of need your knee stable when you play basketball with all the running, cutting and jumping the sport requires. Plus, full recovery from ACL reconstruction surgery can take at least a year, and a full return to one’s pre-injury form is not always guaranteed. Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose, for example, did lose a fair amount of his trademark explosiveness after he tore his left ACL during his third season in the NBA.

The ACL has the word cruciate in the middle of it because it forms a criss-cross or X with the posterior cruciate ligament. And X marks the spot here in keeping your knee stable. Both ligaments connect your upper leg bone, known as the femur, with the bigger lower leg bone, known as the tibia, as I have explained in Forbes.

A ligament is a band of fibrous tissue that connects one bone to another bone to help stabilize the joint. Now, there are additional ligaments running along the sides of each of your knees to connect the femur and tibia. So it’s not as if your lower leg would completely fall off if you were to completely tear both the ACL and the PCL in a given knee. But a complete tear of either cruciate ligament could be crucial and mean that your knee joint goes a rocking in bad way.

A doctor can get a sense if you’ve torn your ACL by checking the stability of your knee and seeing how much your lower leg moves when pulled. This includes checking for something called an anterior drawer sign. But to confirm an ACL tear and the degree of the tear, you typically need to undergo an MRI.

How Do You Treat An ACL Tear?

A partial tear of the ACL may not need surgical repair if the knee remains relatively stable. The same may be true with a complete tear. However, someone who plays competitive basketball (or some other sport that requires a lot of cutting) like Irving typically will need to get a completely torn ACL reconstructed.

An ACL reconstruction involves creating a new ACL since such ligaments don’t grow back on their own. This can consist of harvesting a tendon from another part of your body, most often part of your patella tendon or your hamstring tendons, specifically the gracilis and semitendinosus tendons, to then serve as a graft. When the tissue comes from your own body, it’s called an autograft, which sounds like the word “autograph” with a “t” at the the end of it, because you are creating a graft from yourself.

Alternatively, you can get an allograft, which is when the tissue comes from someone else. A common allograft is an ACL from a cadaver. Since you aren’t snipping off tissue from other parts of your body, recovery from an allograft ACL reconstruction tends to be quicker than from an autograft one. However, allografts can be less durable than autografts, and in some cases your body and immune system could even effectively say, “Oh, hell no,” and end up rejecting the foreign tissue.

Surgery will only be the first chapter in Irving’s recovery from the ACL tear. Months of rather intense rehab will follow. The muscles around the knee tend to shut down and shrink with startling rapidity once all that inflammation builds up around a torn ACL. Therefore, you’ve got to go through lots of physical therapy and exercises to get those muscles built up and strong again.

Plus, after such a serious injury and surgery, your knee can be a bit like that lead character Matt Damon played in The Bourne Ultimatum, rather amnesic. Your knee can quickly forget how it is supposed to work and function. It can even lose proprioception, which is its ability to know where it is in space. It can take months to completely retrain your knee to do all that it is supposed to do.

Therefore, it can take months to return to all regular daily activities. And, again, if your daily activities consist of dribbling and shooting a basketball and getting past other top athletes, you may need at least six months to get back on the court. Even after you do return to playing basketball in some way, don’t expect to immediately be the same full-throttle player you may have been. You and your knee will still have to re-learn a lot. Plus, it will be natural to be rather unsure about your newly reconstructed knee. It can be at least a year or two before you stop worrying about your knee and feel whole again.

Will Irving Fully Recover From The ACL Tear And Surgery?

The Mavs did tweet — or X or whatever they’re called these days — that “We know you’ll come back stronger than ever,” followed by thumbs up and infinity sign emojis:

One emoji that should accompany any ACL injury and reconstruction for an elite athlete is a question mark. While surgery and physical therapy techniques have gotten better over the years, you never know for sure how much quickness, agility and cutting ability will be lost. Irving’s game, including his legendary crossover dribble, heavily relies on such athleticism. If he does suffer a dip as Rose did, a big question will be how Irving adjusts his game accordingly.

At 32 years of age, Irving is also already around the age when NBA players’ athleticism in many cases starts to decline. An analysis of ESPN data has suggested that NBA players are at their prime from 27 to 31, when they can still combine their youthful athleticism with more experience. Of course, Irving is not your typical NBA player. But even a guy named Michael Jordan had to adapt his game when he reached his mid-30s and wasn’t quite as high-flying.

Moreover, it can get a bit harder to recover from major injuries and surgery the older you get. When you are in your 20s, you can seemingly do all sorts of things to your body with little consequence, like eating an entire pizza for breakfast and then playing full-court basketball soon afterwards. Therefore, one could expect the recovery of someone in his 30s to be a little more challenging than those in their 20s, although Rose was only 23 when he suffered his ACL tear.

Did Irving’s Workload Lead to His ACL Tear?

Another question is how much Irving’s increased workload following the Dončić trade contributed to his injury. The game against the Kings came after a 10-game stretch in which Irving had averaged 39.3 minutes of playing time a game. That average topped all NBA players during the period running from Feb. 4 to March 2. Again, that’s a 32-year-old playing more minutes per game than a whole lot of 20 somethings. But it can be difficult to tell whether a given ACL tear resulted from the ligament finally giving out after being progressively weakened from a heavy workload over time versus a single unfortunate twist of the knee independent of what had happened prior.

An analysis of 139 women football players (known as soccer players in the U.S.) did suggest those with higher workloads from playing for both clubs and national teams were more likely to suffer ACL injuries. Ligaments, like many other body parts, could suffer microscopic damage and otherwise get weaker with overuse. There’s also the possibility that when you get fatigued, your muscles may not be as able to fully support your knee, and your footwork can get sloppier, making the possibility of an awkward twist all the more likely.

What is certain is that the Mavs will miss Irving’s average of 24.7 points, 4.8 rebounds and 4.6 assists this season. Only time can tell if he can get back to those levels in the next NBA season in 2025-26. There’s no denying that this is a big blow for both the Mavericks and Irving. In fact, in a live stream on Tuesday, Irving did say, “It does suck. A lot. I ain’t going to lie to you guys. This one stings for sure,” as you can see here:

At the same time, Irving apparently didn’t want fans to shed too many tears for his tear. “Just wanted to let you guys know that I’m OK and I will be OK moving forward,” he added. Keep in mind that Rose did go on to have a highly productive NBA career after his ACL reconstruction. Furthermore, a number of other players have come back from similar injuries just as strong or in some cases stronger than ever, such as Al Harrington, Al Jefferson, Baron Davis, Jamal Crawford, Corey Brewer and Bonzi Wells.

The stars haven’t exactly been aligning for the Mavericks this season as opposed to last season, when they made a somewhat surprising run as the Western Conference’s fifth seed all the way to NBA Finals before losing to the Boston Celtics. In fact, the Mavericks can’t even seem to keep stars like Kyrie Irving on the court. But fans next season will get to see what the stars have in store for Irving after he returns from his injury and surgery.