The Dallas Mavericks are cruising again, with a third straight win on Monday alleviating the brief stall that had interrupted the team’s previous ascent. The result-orientated whiplash is best explained by the team’s schedule than its on-court play, which is operating closer to an even baseline than it might seem. But there are some optimistic signs that it’s trending up.
To address the histrionics that consumed the recent five-losses-in-six-games stretch, this team isn’t last season’s. That version of the Mavericks, despite some superficial similarities, was a bad team without enough talent on a roster half-built after the midseason trade for Kyrie Irving. This year’s team has far more depth and competency around the superstar pairing of Irving and Luka Dončić. Dallas is 21-5 against teams under .500, the league’s fifth-best record against such opponents, with eight of its remaining 17 games coming against such teams. And the team’s 16-23 record against teams above .500, while beneath its own aspirations, still conveys a good chance for Dallas to win any matchup against fellow Play-In Tournament contenders.
Dallas’ remaining season, and some version of a postseason that’s almost certain to follow, still represents a reckoning on the team’s construction. Since the Kristaps Porziņģis trade in 2022, general manager Nico Harrison and his front office have committed to different variations of the same formula next to Dončić: a scoring guard with defensive deficiencies as his co-star, as many two-way wings as possible and traditional rim-running centers. That approach worked for LeBron James’ 2016 championship-winning Cleveland Cavaliers and James Harden’s 2018 Houston Rockets, who came closest to beating the full-strength Steph Curry–Kevin Durant Warriors.
But that was another era, and Dončić is a different player than James and Harden despite many similarities. Dallas proved how well it could work in 2022, making an unexpected run to the Western Conference finals, but that roster was ultimately too limited. After roster-bolstering trade deadline additions this season, Dallas believes it has its deepest team yet around Dončić. If that faith is rewarded with a successful postseason push, even one that predictably falls short of the NBA Finals, it might vindicate the roster only needing one or two more tweaks around the same strategy.
If that doesn’t happen, though, the questions become ones of self-identity. Are the players still not good enough? Does Dončić still need to improve incrementally? Is there non-roster change that could improve this? Or is the formula this organization has used to build its roster for years actually flawed? That’s the weight the rest of the season carries, and it cannot fully be answered until all of the information can be extracted from this year’s ending.
Until then, it’s worth laying out four additional overarching questions and how they might be answered.
1. Who can play in the postseason?
Dallas juggled its rotation after last week’s loss to the Indiana Pacers, moving Derrick Jones Jr. and Daniel Gafford into the starting lineup over Josh Green and Dereck Lively II. Tim Hardaway Jr.’s minutes have fallen, and Dante Exum has taken his place as the first player off the bench. Maxi Kleber, too, has been used more sparingly, and more often as a power forward than a center.
Exum is worth focusing on. He had emerged as the team’s much-needed “connector” before missing 22 of 24 games with two different injuries. After a six-point win over the Miami Heat in which he was deployed in the closing lineup, Exum said he feels fully healthy and has no minutes restriction.
“Who knows,” he said when asked if heavier minutes contributed to the time he missed. “I’m not a medical professional, so I leave that to them.”
The team does believes his increased workload had some correlation, though.
“We need him to play every game,” coach Jason Kidd said. “Right now, trying to keep him under 25 minutes is important.”
Since the All-Star break, Dallas has had five instances of a player not named Dončić recording five-plus assists. Exum has three of them. Since Jan. 1, in fact, Exum is one of just four players on the team with at least three games of five or more assists, even though he’s only suited up nine times in that span. While Exum is a drastically different player than Spencer Dinwiddie, his growing importance hearkens back to the team’s success with three ballhandlers (Dončić, Jalen Brunson and Dinwiddie) during its 2022 postseason run.
Dallas had the league’s worst assist percentage since the All-Star break entering Monday’s game against Chicago, something induced by opponents’ defensive strategy against Dončić. Rather than sending aggressive help and double-teams at him, allowing Dončić to put them into scramble situations with his passing, teams have begun daring Dončić to score. It hasn’t exactly worked because Dallas still has the league’s third-best offense since the break; teams discovered long ago that no defensive coverage fully contains Dončić. But the trickle-down effect of more Dončić exertion and fewer touches from the role players often nets out as a positive for Dallas’ opponents. It highlights Exum’s importance as another player who can tilt defenses when Dončić or Irving are off the floor.
Do the scrambled rotations Exum can create make Jones more viable? Jones had been benched shortly after the trade deadline, and his minutes dropped from about 26 per game before P.J. Washington’s arrival to about 16 since. But Jones is probably the team’s best point-of-attack defender, and he’s shown enough signs of an offensive re-emergence to re-enter the starting five. Because Green has struggled guarding opponents’ primary options this season, Dallas needs someone like Jones to pair with Washington, a player better at making off-ball rotations than directly defending the pick-and-roll. Can the amalgamation of these four players, deployed correctly against a playoff opponent, completely excise Hardaway’s spacey defense from a playoff rotation?
And then there are the centers, which lead us to …
2. What can Dallas do against five-out opponents?
Dallas’ three-game win streak has come against non-shooting centers: Miami’s Bam Adebayo and Thomas Bryant; Detroit’s Jalen Duren and James Wiseman; and Chicago’s Nikola Vučević and Andre Drummond. (Vučević does shoot 3s, but the Mavericks guarded him without any respect for his shot.) In these games, we’ve learned Gafford and Lively will obliterate centers like them in humiliating fashion. Gafford has made 28 consecutive shots, the most in the play-by-play tracking era that began in 1996, and Lively joined him on Monday with a career-high 22 points on 11-of-12 shooting.
In Dallas, Dončić uses athletic roll men as an extension of himself. He made a mockery of Chicago’s drop coverage, despite the Bulls allowing the league’s eighth-fewest shots at the rim. Gafford and Lively are the most explosive centers Dončić has ever been paired with, and the 20-year-old Lively has encased himself in the team’s future. His emergence this season is an enormous reason Dallas has rarely faltered against bad teams.
But Lively still is a rookie, and he’s struggled when matched up against the shooting centers many contenders employ. Although Gafford gets more leeway as he adjusts to a new team, he, too, has looked overwhelmed defensively against several different types of big men. It’s why he played only 13 combined minutes in losses against the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics. It’s hard to imagine either of those centers fairing well against Denver’s Nikola Jokić, although that’s true for the whole league.
A better question is whether Lively and Gafford can be more effective against smaller teams who play five-out basketball, whether it’s an actual smaller center like Golden State’s Draymond Green or a shooting big without an overwhelming physical presence like Oklahoma City’s Chet Holmgren. Those three teams — Golden State, Oklahoma City, Denver, in that order — are the Mavericks’ next three opponents.
Dallas doesn’t want to rely too heavily on Kleber at the five, but it also can’t keep running drop coverage, a pick-and-roll scheme suited for Lively and Gafford, when it gives up the league’s most points when using it. Against a team like Chicago, which has plodding big men and guards who can’t reliably punish Dallas in the 10-to-15-feet range, it looks great. When Curry or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are in command, it’s another story.
There’s a lot to learn about these big men in these coming matchups.
3. Can Dallas find defensive synchronicity?
Dallas entered Monday’s game against Chicago allowing 123.1 points per 100 possessions since the All-Star break, the league’s worst mark in that stretch by nearly four points. While the team has shown more signs of defensive life of late, it’s also true that Chicago simply did not punish Dallas’ breakdowns at the same rate other opponents have. And while breakdowns happen to every team in every game, there are still far too many possessions that look like this, where Kleber’s help puts him in no-man’s land, Lively doesn’t recognize it soon enough to make the rotation himself, and Dončić doesn’t deny the swing-swing pass to the corner.
Dallas had essentially already beaten Chicago by the end of the first quarter, but this play happened before that. Chicago’s failure to take advantage of Dallas’ defenses lapses won’t be treated so kindly in the postseason, much less by the opponents Dallas faces this week.
When the team went to the conference finals in 2022, its defense exceeded the sum of its parts. It helped to have two complementary wing defenders in Dorian Finney-Smith and Reggie Bullock, but the bigger keys to the unit’s success were the off-ball rotations that seemed to happen within a hive mind. This season’s team hasn’t gotten there yet.
“It was just having everyone collectively together,” Kleber said when asked why that 2021-22 team was so in sync. “We have a few new guys here. I’m not saying it’s their fault; it’s everybody’s fault. But we have to talk better and figure it out.”
Because Dallas’ coaching staff asks its players to make frequent rotations — sometimes running defensive schemes that almost seem meant to trigger scrambling situations, sometimes asking players to make rotations that would usually be Dončić’s — that synchronicity must come. This week’s matchups should help determine if the Mavericks’ defense has actually improved or if it just ran into a favorable stretch of games.
4. Will Dončić do the little things?
Dončić’s historic streak of six consecutive 30-point triple-doubles, the longest in league history, ended against Chicago when he settled for just 27 points, 12 rebounds and 14 assists. Of course, he also tied another historical stretch, joining Oscar Robertson and Michael Jordan as the third player to achieve seven consecutive 20-point triple-doubles in a row. That, quintessentially, is the Dončić experience: As soon as one historic stretch ends, he’s already in the midst of another one.
Dončić typically demurs when asked about such statistics, answering with some form of It’s amazing, I don’t know what to say, but what’s most important is we got the win. Dončić’s competitiveness can be seen almost everywhere on the court: his trick shots addition, his frustrations with officiating, his frequent clutch heroics and more. But if Dončić wants to win — deep into the playoffs, against the league’s best teams, on the grandest stage — he needs to mix in more of the little winning plays alongside the many grandiose big ones he performs on a nightly basis.
For example, tracking his defensive assignment to the corner in the first quarter, even if his team’s already up 22 points largely thanks to him:
Before the Mavericks beat Miami last week, Kidd emphasized the need to surrender fewer corner 3s, which Dallas has conceded more of this season than all but three other teams.
“We’ve got to make a conscious effort to be tied together,” Kidd said. “It can’t just be three guys. It has to be all five.”
Although the defensive effort improved against Miami after a horrendous first quarter, Dallas still gave up 18 such shots. When Kidd said it can’t just be three players, it’s fairly obvious which two he was omitting: Dončić and Irving are the two players who guard the opponent’s corners more often than anyone.
Irving, in the midst of a pedestrian six-game stretch, has not been the uber-impactful offensive force that he’s mostly been since arriving in Dallas. He’s been even more of a defensive problem too, which must change. Granted, this is the most consecutive games (16) he’s played since 2018, an almost unbelievable stat despite his history. In Chicago, Irving attended the team’s Sunday practice and Monday shootaround in street clothes, presumably an attempt to reduce his workload for the stretch run. But there’s no doubt Dallas will need more from him as the schedule toughens.
It’s essentially impossible for Dončić to provide more offensively to this team. He’s one of the league’s best few players, a brilliant maestro who terrorizes every defense imaginable. No postseason opponent wants to face him. But any team that does will ruthlessly target him on the other end of the floor. Dončić has defended better this season, and he often rises to challenges, stripping big men attempting to post him up and moving his feet against perimeter stars. It’s the small things, such as the rotations out to the corner, that must remain consistent. Those are the thin margins that separate teams in seven-game series.
If Dončić simply cannot do that with this offensive load, and if Dallas’ season ends in a disappointing manner, maybe that’s an existential challenge Dallas must address this summer. But Dončić can do this. He leads this team on the court, brilliantly and impossibly on a nightly basis. He needs help, of course, and he’s gotten more of it this season than ever before. Now, let’s see how far he can lead this team the rest of the season, with grand highlights but also with unnoticed rotations.
(Top photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)
