Dallas Mavericks guard Roddy Beaubois will have surgery on Friday to place a pin his broken left foot.

Beaubois, 22, is expected to miss two to three months, which all but takes him out of training camp and possibly will sideline him for the beginning of the season in late October.

"It's a setback, but it's not the end of the world," Mavs president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson said. "It could have been worse. He could be a horse."

That is true. At worst, it's a disappointing way for the Mavs to end the summer and look ahead to training camp in late September. Beaubois is clearly the wild card in for the 2010-11 season. Dallas is expecting its second-year shooting guard/point-guard-in-training to deliver dynamic scoring at the rim and beyond the 3-point arc.

Perhaps most disappointing for Mavs coach Rick Carlisle is that Beaubois' injury will likely stall any plan of starting him at shooting guard, at least initially. Such a scenario would have slid Caron Butler to his more-favored small forward position and moved Shawn Marion (happily or not) to the bench, where he could provide a highly energetic and productive 25 minutes a game.

The Mavs surely would have had to soothe Marion on such a move and that might have been easier to do if implemented from the get-go. Now that Marion will play the starting small forward role throughout training camp, the preseason and perhaps into the regular season, making a switch to the French-speaking youngster could be trickier.

Bringing Beaubois off the bench isn't the end of the world either, but inserting him as the starter helps to line up the depth at shooting guard and small forward better. If Butler starts at shooting guard, suddenly you have Beaubois, Jason Terry and rookie Dominique Jones clawing for playing time off the bench. Butler and Marion are the only true small forwards on the roster.