DALLAS — It’s been a rare sight: The Dallas Mavericks building leads with Luka Dončić watching on the sidelines. While the Mavericks outscored the San Antonio Spurs by eight points during the 30 minutes Dončić played Thursday, they built their advantage by another 18 points in the stretches without him.
Advertisement
They eventually won 142-118, the first victory Dončić has achieved alongside new addition Kyrie Irving.
An idling Dončić of the past — in street clothes not playing, in sweatsuits sitting on the bench, inactive away from the ball — almost always has meant bad things for the success of the Mavericks this season. They had been outscored by 92 points without him on the court this season, and the minutes without him, at least prior to the Irving trade, would’ve made Dallas the league’s worst offense. For most of this season, this team hasn’t withstood Dončić-less basketball. Not just the games he didn’t play, which is normal for any team with a star with such gravitational pull, but any minutes at all.
Sure, Thursday’s result came against the laughably bad Spurs, a team that has lost 20 of its past 21 games, and Dončić wasn’t even needed in the fourth quarter. But he was the one laughing at the end of the first half, standing idle on the floor’s weak side while Irving split through defenders for a buzzer-beating bucket.
It wasn’t nervous laughter, not with the bucket putting Dallas up 11. What, then?
“There were, like, three or four people on (Irving), and he still got an open layup, so that’s why I was laughing,” Dončić explained afterward. “It was insane.”
The layup from Irving wasn’t a well-timed joke or a tight, five-minute stand-up routine. It wasn’t calling back to past references or an embarrassingly self-deprecating dig or a particularly witty one-liner. Perhaps it was the subversion of expectations that Dončić found so funny.
Superficially, it was Irving scoring in a seemingly impossible situation. More specifically, it was one of Dončić’s teammates succeeding without needing any of his help — and doing it in a situation that would almost always come down to him.
Irving finished with 23 points on 8-of-13 shooting and six assists and was a team-high plus-34. Coming into Thursday’s game, the Mavericks had outscored opponents by 14 points in the Dončić-less minutes with Irving on the court. They were averaging 123.1 points per 100 possessions in those minutes, per Cleaning the Glass, a preposterous figure that has been helped by the poor defenses Irving has played thus far — and the second units he gets to cook against. But even with those advantages, Dončić still hasn’t been accustomed to this sort of success without him being present for it this season.
Advertisement
What might have caused Dončić to laugh wasn’t only Irving’s layup, but also that he felt entirely confident, for perhaps the first time all season, that Irving should take that quarter’s final shot. And when he did it with such ease, the tension these situations once caused blurred into relief and release, one that could only be expressed with a boyish grin and a chuckle.
It’s still the Dončić show in Dallas, but at last this season, he’s no longer alone on stage as the sole leading man.
This team’s defense remains horrific. San Antonio attempted 48 percent of its shots on Thursday directly at the rim, far past the league average of 33.5 percent and the Spurs’ own average of 35.2 percent. (The Spurs have the league’s third-worst offense this season.) That stems from a combination of things: a lack of interior defense, poor one-on-one work on the perimeter and particularly poor effort to get back in transition.
Dončić, the main culprit for the last factor, was particularly poor in the first quarter. His arguing with officials won’t bring another rim protector to this team. In lieu of that, the perimeter defenders have to do more to prevent the team’s lack of shot blocking from being exposed.
Maxi Kleber’s imminent return — which may happen during this six-game homestand but certainly will happen in the next few weeks — is the team’s best chance at reinforcements. Kleber, per se, isn’t a rim deterrent, the basketball linguistics term for a player who doesn’t only block shots but scares players away from even attempting them. But he has been the team’s most impactful defender for years now with his versatility and understanding on that end of the court.
Justin Holiday might help too. Holiday’s Mavericks’ debut lasted 21 minutes, and he hit 5 of 6 3s for 15 points. Four of them came from the floor’s left-sided corner, a location where he had only made 4 of 19 this season. But the 10-year veteran has converted 40.4 percent of his corner 3s for his career and has clearly arrived in a situation where he’s going to receive more of them than he ever received. He’s not shy launching open shots. There’s a needed place for that in Dallas.
Advertisement
In his postgame news conference, Mavericks coach Jason Kidd mentioned the possibility of Holiday starting at some point, an interesting aside that was framed as a “maybe we’ll look at it” but certainly casts insight into Kidd’s desperate search for lineups that can prevent points. It’s no surprise that Frank Ntilikina leaped Jaden Hardy in the rotation; this team’s problems aren’t scoring right now. Holiday, with a slight 6-foot-6 frame, isn’t the bigger wing defender this team really needs, but he’s a capable scheme defender who played well on that end Thursday. That’s his path to more minutes.
Speaking of the rotation, it seems somewhat predictable. The guaranteed starters will be Dončić, Irving and, most likely, Dwight Powell. Reggie Bullock, Josh Green, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Holiday will serve as a quartet of capable, if undersized, wings. Kleber and Christian Wood will be the first big men off the bench in some order, while JaVale McGee will get a few more chances against bigger teams before — assuming no miraculous turnaround to his performances this season — he is designated to an emergency role. Whether the larger Kleber-Wood pairing can work or if Kleber simply reduces Wood’s role to a limited bench scoring option remains to be seen. There’s little chance the rest of the team plays more than spot minutes, with Ntilikina’s defending and Hardy’s scoring burst as the only real X-factors.
Being able to stretch Hardaway to 26 minutes, as he played Thursday en route to knocking down six 3s, should be a luxury rather than a necessity. When those shots aren’t falling, more defensive-minded players take his place. Whether that’s enough to piece together significant workable defensive units, who knows. But while Dončić can breath easier in the minutes he’s not on the floor, the team’s real success or failure come playoff time depends on how often it can prevent other teams from scoring.
(Photo of Kyrie Irving and Luka Dončić: Jerome Miron / USA Today)
