Two wolves exist inside this season’s Dallas Mavericks.
One version is mangy and aging, enduring only thanks to Luka Dončić’s presence on the roster. That version of the team relies on his hyperbolic performances and has lost multiple games, even to weakened opponents apex predators should feast on. The five defeats in six games between Nov. 16 and 27 had Mavericks fans worried the mangy and aging version would be here to stay.
But this team’s other wolf has shown up in the past five matchups. Dallas has won four of those, most recently Tuesday’s 116-115 victory against the Denver Nuggets on the second night of a back-to-back. It’s a team focused on defending like it’s hunting in packs and threatening opponents with long-distance shooting, like they’re the camo-wearing hunters of the forest. In those past five games, Dallas has shot 41.7 percent behind the arc, the second-best mark in the league. They’ve allowed the 13th-fewest points per 100 possessions, which, while similar to their mark over the previous six games, has come against much better opposition.
We’re all prone to recency bias. After the team’s two most impressive wins of the season — especially the second one, since it’s really hard to play well in Denver on the second night of a back-to-back — it would be reasonable to declare in bold typeface things like: The Mavericks are finally who we thought they would be! Or, Dallas is a sleeping giant that is finally waking up! And hey, it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate.
It’s likelier, however, the Mavericks still have both these wolves within them — that they’ll still sometimes act like the league’s Robin Hood, taking wins from the rich and giving them to the poor. The Mavericks’ mission the rest of this season will be to resemble the wolf pack version of themselves much more often than their mangy and aging rendition.
Dallas finally ended one of this season’s more maligned streaks on Tuesday: they won without Luka Dončić scoring at least 30 points in a game. At times this season, the Mavericks looked wholly incapable of doing that.
Tuesday’s victory over the Nuggets was still Dončić-driven, of course. He had the usual volume of touches, ran the same outsized proportions of pick-and-rolls and created the same number of chances for his teammates because defenses fear him so much. He even had a triple-double — 12 assists, 10 rebounds — despite playing poorly by his standards. To be certain, Dončić finishing with 22 points on 5-of-17 shooting is a level of “bad” that surpasses just about anybody else’s “great.” But him doing that and the Mavericks still winning is reassuring, even if the 30-plus point benchmark will probably continue to be predictive in the long run.
Another key variable dictating whether the Mavericks are the fearsome pack or the mangy loner is 3-point percentage. Dallas is 8-3 when shooting better than 39 percent and 5-8 when shooting below that figure. Many teams have similar splits, of course, but Dallas has an oddity in its numbers: it actually generates more wide-open 3s in losses (21.0) than wins (20.3).
This isn’t the case for the Golden State Warriors and the Boston Celtics, the other two teams with a similar share of 3s taken per game. Normally, generating wide-open 3s is a sign of a good, functioning and healthy offense performance. Makes sense, right?
Mavericks are finally discovering ways to win when Luka Dončić isn’t…..
But Dončić is so good that this team’s offense revs up the moment opponents have to actually respect his teammate’s shotmaking ability behind the arc, thus subsequently focusing on him less. Jason Kidd has incentivized this by being more pragmatic with his rotations over the past week, replacing Reggie Bullock with Tim Hardaway Jr. in the starting lineup and giving Josh Green more minutes. It’s possible the wide-open 3s stat flips by
READ MORE:Kidd compares Luka Doncic with…
the year’s end as defenses continue adjusting and conforming to the unique pressure of guarding the league’s least guardable player. But where most teams go as far as their best player takes them, the Mavericks might go as far as their best player’s teammates do, even if they excel as vessels of his ridiculous influence on each and every game.
At some point soon, Dallas will probably have a performance where the team shoots 10-of-49 behind the arc and looks woeful in defeat. It could happen against almost any opponent with little warning, whether the opposition is contending for a title or for the services of Victor Wembanyama. With the way this Mavericks team is constructed, it’s not always enough for Dončić to score 37 points if opponents don’t fear his open teammates.
But Dallas has shown over the past five games it maintains a fairly high ceiling, because the same teammates that Dončić relied upon last season are capable of doing it again. When Hardaway’s torrid shooting cools off, perhaps it’ll be Dorian Finney-Smith heating up, as he did in making five 3s against Denver on Tuesday. Or perhaps Hardaway can continue causing migraines for opposing defenses even when he’s not knocking down five 3s every night, which may not be sustainable.
Everything successful about this team starts with Dončić, but it often ends with Dončić throwing a laser-guided pass, at angles mathematicians haven’t yet discovered, right into the hands of an open teammate. They won’t always make the ensuing shots as often as they have during this stretch, but Dallas playing as a pack is how they can keep beating anyone.