Over a month ago, I wrote about the Mavericks’ rather gloomy stretch when the team lost five of six games, all to playoff teams, without much resistance. While I noted the season wasn’t over and the Mavericks had time to figure it out, I did say the team was starting to “run out of answers.”
It was fair to wonder at that moment not if the Mavericks season was over (it clearly wasn’t), but to ponder if this version of the team was something substantially better than a playoff hopeful. The Mavericks had two electric stars, with a high-powered offense, but little defensive force — or, seemingly, scheme — to back it up.
Now a month later, not only have the Mavericks found those answers, they’re starting to answer questions that would have seemed previously inconceivable, like this one: can the Mavericks win the championship?
Here’s the crazy part — I think the answer is yes.
Dallas wrapped up its regular season Sunday with a meaningless blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Mavericks had clinched the five seed last week, and earned their 50th win, the team’s second in three years. When I wrote the above column after the five of six losing stretch, Dallas was 34-28. A 16-4 stretch to end the season has raised all sorts of possibilities about how far this Mavericks team can go, especially when you consider three of the four losses were basically punts, with Luka Doncic resting in three, and most of the team resting in the final two losses.
At full strength, the Mavericks have only lost one game since their March 5 loss to the Indiana Pacers.
So yes, the NBA title is not currently an outlandish objective for these Dallas Mavericks. Let me explain why.
The defense has transformed
For most of the Luka Doncic-era, the Mavericks have been a below-average defense. The only exception was 2022, when Dallas sported the first and only top-10 defense with Doncic on board. The result? A trip to the Western Conference Finals.
It’s no surprise that a team with Doncic regularly finds itself with an elite offense, even without exceptional talent. It’s also not a shock that a Doncic team regularly finds itself short on defensive prowess. Adding Kyrie Irving to the mix only amplified these two truths, as the Mavericks tinkered and toyed behind the scenes to find the right mix. If your two best players are Doncic and Irving, that makes finding the right role players paramount — Dallas would need quality defenders, yes, but also players versatile enough that you aren’t totally sacrificing the other side of the ball and forcing Doncic and Irving to do everything offensively.
First, on the defense, mission accomplished — so far. When Dallas made the trade deadline moves for PJ Washington and Daniel Gafford, it was clear the team was ready to put its issues of size behind them. With those two alongside rookie center Dereck Lively, Derrick Jones Jr., and Dante Exum, Dallas finally had a crop of athletes that didn’t look so undersized in the paint.
It didn’t look good early, with those five losses in six games right out of the All-Star break. The Mavericks were bigger, but still getting lost off-ball — overhelping from the strong side corners, with their stars getting exposed in rotations, and the drop coverage with Gafford in particular looking fraught. What’s remarkable is how quickly the team has not only stopped the bleeding from that stretch, but completely changed the script: since the trade deadline, Dallas boasts one of the most formidable defenses in the league with a 111.5 defense rating according to Cleaning the Glass, good for seventh in that time frame.
So, what changed? First off, it’s clear both Washington and Gafford grew a bit more comfortable in their roles and the Mavericks scheme. That combined with the right lineup changes allowed the Mavericks to flip the script on what has been an issue for years — guarding the paint.
During the losing stretch, the Mavericks were getting torched in the pick and roll, with Josh Green starting and the main point of attack defender. Green has regressed mightily on the defensive end this season, with his screen navigation being the main culprit. Pull up any defensive play involving Green this season, and it won’t take long to find him slamming into a screen, leaving his big out to dry and forcing the defense into scramble situations. Mavericks coach Jason Kidd swapped Green with Derrick Jones Jr., and then Green left the lineup shortly thereafter with a nasty ankle sprain. From there Jones kept starting, with Exum as the first guard off the bench. That meant Dallas’ two best point-of-attack defenders in Exum and Jones played most of the game. The difference in their screen navigation since is staggering.
Screen navigation is important on defense, since so much modern NBA basketball involves the pick and roll. It’s especially important to what the Mavericks want to do on defense, since the team plays a traditional rim protector for most of the game in Gafford and Lively.
Dallas will ask those two to occasionally switch and trap, but that’s mostly to throw a curveball and mix things up — for the most part the Mavericks ask them to guard the paint in the pick and roll. Drop coverage can be a cardinal sin for a defense if the perimeter defender can’t get around a screen. With the big dropping back, if the perimeter defender can’t get through, that leaves the big on an island with the ball handler gaining a full head of steam. With Jones and Exum, they mostly stay attached to the ball handler, forcing them closer to the big man and hoping to entice an awkward midrange pull-up or contested floater.
Even when Jones or Exum do get caught up in a screen, their ability to recover has been on point, with the bigs doing just enough to hold up the ball handler and allow the perimeter defender to make the recovery.
Plays like that are where chemistry and comfortability come into play. Basketball is too fluid to be as rigid as “always drop in the pick and roll” or “always go over the screen.” Each play in basketball can tell its own story, with its own twists. In the play above, Jones gets walloped by a decent screen, so Gafford creeps out further than he normally would to meet Malik Monk near the paint. That allows Jones to get back and contest, forcing Monk to take a difficult attempt near the rim.
So that leads to the Mavericks defensive identity post-trade deadline: wall off the paint. With Jones and Exum chasing ball handlers around screens and Gafford and Lively stonewalling anyone that gets near the rim, Dallas’ defense has suffocated offenses by denying them the easiest and most efficient shots in basketball: layups and dunks.
Before the trade deadline, the Mavericks were allowing 32.6 percent of total shots near the rim, 13th in the NBA, according to Cleaning the Glass. After the deadline, that number has dipped to 30.2 percent, eighth in the NBA. When opponents do actually get to the rim, it’s a night and day difference: pre-trades Mavericks opponents shot 68.2 percent at the rim (28th in the league), post-trade that number is 59.8 (first).
The Mavericks are limiting the amount of shots they allow at the cup since the trade deadline and then the shots that do happen near the basket are heavily contested. Opponent mid-range shots have increased since the trade deadline as well, as the Mavericks invite those contested floaters near the free-throw line, knowing the length of Gafford and Lively (combined with Jones and Exum in rear-contesting) is enough to make them even more difficult than normal. Not to mention since the All-Star break, the Mavericks’ foul rate as a team has dropped as well, with Dallas taking full advantage of the new whistle allowing for more physical contact.
Washington’s presence has been a huge boon for this scheme, as it requires a help man to rotate and cover the dunker’s spot or tag the roll man as the big helps contain the pick and roll. In the past, the Mavericks had smaller players doing that job, and now with Washington, the team has another legitimate 6’7 athlete that can swat shots and stay sturdy in the paint. It makes it harder to attack the Mavericks’ weak links when the team regularly plays lineups now with Irving as the only small player on the floor.
It also helps when your stars buy-in. Doncic and Irving looked lost defensively for most of the first quarter of the season, and the new trades have reinvigorated their effort level. I don’t think anyone will mistake those two for being lockdown defenders — far from it — but they’re executing the scheme more consistently, and making better off-ball rotations.
The flip side is the Mavericks are still giving up a decent amount of threes, especially from the corner. Since the trade deadline the Mavericks are 22nd in share of corner threes allowed, which makes sense when you consider how the Mavericks are chasing over the screen with the big in drop or slightly up. That opens you up to weakside corner threes if the rotations aren’t crisp or if the Mavericks just want to gamble that the ball handler can’t make the pass or the player can’t make the shot.
A defense can’t take away everything in the modern NBA, so the Mavericks are betting that taking away the paint will be their most consistent path to success. Dallas has gotten OK three-point shooting luck to close the season, but nothing that screams this defensive turnaround is a fluke.
Again, a layup or dunk is the best shot in basketball. Taking those away is a good idea.
The offense has developed counters
We know that Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving are really good — that was true last season, even when the Mavericks season sputtered. The duo is still dynamite again, and the two have worked off each other better than before with more direct screening action and give-and-go’s.
But it has taken more than just those two being great for the Mavericks to become a true contender. The team needs counters, especially after the losing stretch post-All-Star break, when defenses were content to play Doncic and Irving 1-on-1 to prevent those two from finding role players in advantageous positions. Doncic was scoring a lot, but the team was losing.
Along with the defensive turnaround, the team has experimented with different ways to keep the ball moving without Doncic or Irving needed to grind down a possession in isolation. If a team is going to guard Doncic straight up to take away opportunities from role players, a good counter to that is using your star away from the ball to force an opportunity for said role player.
Who knew that Daniel Gafford was basically diet Nikola Jokic? Gafford is averaging two assists per game since March 26, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is for a mostly rim-running, dunking center. Dallas has truly weaponized Gafford at the high post, with both Irving and occasionally Doncic screening for role players to free them up near the rim.
Stars generate so much gravity, so seeing the Mavericks manipulate that space for an outcome that isn’t for a shot from a star is stuff the team has needed for years.
That’s not to say Doncic isn’t still controlling the game. He is, and he’s leading the league in usage rate since Joel Embiid’s injury disqualified him. But that’s not a bad thing, Doncic is great, great players should have the ball a lot. The issue was the Mavericks needed to change just slightly, and that appears to be happening — the Mavericks are top-10 in pace for the season, a fearsome fastbreak team now that Doncic has the athletes and running mate to hit go-ahead passes when he secures the rebound. Credit Doncic for adapting away from Luka-ball a little to give the team a different flavor of offense, which is all that’s needed to throw defenses off balance.
There’s perhaps no better example of this shift than this play in the win against the Heat last week.
Doncic doesn’t even bring the ball up, and starts off-ball. He comes off a screen from Irving right into a dribble hand-off/pick and roll with Gafford. From there he whips the ball to Irving, who pops to the wing after screening for both Tim Hardaway Jr. and Doncic for an open three. If you squint from a distance you can make out the whirling precision of the Denver Nuggets or Indiana Pacers. It’s a far cry from Doncic pounding the air out of the ball a year ago with overwhelmed teammates.
When Doncic and Irving share the floor, the Mavericks team net rating is plus-10.4 according to Cleaning the Glass, a great number. That duo without Grant Williams, who was shipped out for Washington at the trade deadline? The number goes up to plus-12.8, within spitting distance of elite star duos like the Nuggets, Celtics, Clippers, and Thunder. The Mavericks have two of the greatest shot-makers in the league, and now they are doing a little bit more than just taking shots. It’s not much, but the Mavericks didn’t need that much more.
Last season, in December of 2022, I remarked after a Mavericks loss how similar the roster was compared to a team from Doncic’s rookie season. I compared box scores to the game last season to one from March 2019, and most of the players playing the most minutes were the same.
When Dallas lost to the Clippers in the 2021 playoffs, I wrote the team wasn’t good enough after the roster stayed stagnant in the worst ways. Last season, I wrote about how what happened to the Mavericks, missing the postseason entirely with a healthy, 24-year-old MVP candidate, is unheard of.
Now you look at the Mavericks roster, compared to the ones from Doncic’s first few seasons, and it’s almost unrecognizable. The center rotation two years ago was Dwight Powell, Christian Wood, and JaVale McGee. Now it’s Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively. Dorian Finney-Smith, Reggie Bullock, Josh Richardson, Frank Ntilikina and Theo Pinson are now PJ Washington, Derrick Jones Jr., and Dante Exum. Only two players from Doncic’s rookie season still get minutes, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Maxi Kleber, and both are bench players.
Dallas has done what its needed to do to its roster for years, it just took slightly longer than most expected. Doncic is still young at 25, and now he has a team worthy of being a contender around him.
Only one question is left to answer: will they be the last team standing in June? We can’t know for certain, but after their midseason turnaround and with Luka’s transcendent play, they appear to have as good a chance as anyone.
