Barnstorming: Dallas Mavericks making magic
By Ian Levy
The Dallas Mavericks have the third-best record in the Western Conference. I know, I know, I’m as surprised as anyone.
Sunday night Dallas dropped a close game to the Oklahoma City Thunder, bringing their record to 9-5. In the Western Conference standings, they are currently in front of the Thunder, Houston Rockets, Los Angeles Clippers, and Memphis Grizzlies — all teams penciled into the playoffs ahead of them. They also have an edge on the Utah Jazz, Phoenix Suns, and New Orleans Pelicans, all up-and-coming young teams who were supposed to leapfrog them in the standings as Dallas slid towards irrelevancy.
Rick Carlisle is a magician whose stage shows have long trended towards understated majesty but pushing this roster towards towards the top of the conference is another sort of act entirely.
Down the stretch against the Thunder, a pair of three-pointers by Charlie Villanueva kept Dallas in the game. They played a nearly three minute span of the third quarter with a JaVale McGee-Dwight Powell front court. Figuring out exactly how they’re winning is a challenge. Chandler Parsons is still playing just 17.8 minutes a game. Wesley Matthews is shooting under 35 percent from the field. The Mavericks’ backcourt rotation is an honest-to-goodness four-headed monster featuring Deron Williams, Raymond Felton, J.J. Barea and Devin Harris. It’s like the mythical Hydra but instead of serpents, the heads are Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and Garfield. Besides Dirk, Williams and Parsons, the rest of the roster is shooting 26 percent on three-pointers. These are not the Mavericks we knew from the past two seasons, the ones who charmed a group of skilled role players into an elaborately efficient offense (and equally porous defense). But this group is somehow conjuring wins just the same. They push the pace, they get to the free throw line, and they don’t turn the ball over. On defense, they are surprisingly competent.
It’s certainly not all rainbows and sunshine. The Mavericks’ SRS (point differential adjusted for strength of schedule) ranks just 16th in the league. They’ve done seem feasting on the league’s weak and infirmed, already beating the Philadelphia 76ers, Pelicans, and the Los Angeles Lakers (twice). Their wins against the Clippers and Rockets are looking less meaningful everyday. Holding on to make the playoffs is going to be a wild ride and it’s hard to see how they do much damage even if they are able to get there. But then again, it’s hard to see how they have been better than everyone in the Western Conference except the Spurs and the Warriors thus far.
When the Dallas Mavericks won their title in 2011 they did it with Dirk Nowitzki’s brilliance, Carlisle’s steady hand, and a synergistic array of complementary talents. It was a roster that, at the beginning of the year, looked every bit as disjointed and hapless as this season’s did. Which is the championship curse that Dallas must now carry with them. That playoff run was such a lightning strike, a fortuitous confluence of players all peaking at the same time, that’s hard not to see that potential everywhere. I don’t mean to imply the Mavericks were lucky, at least not more so than any other champion. Their victory just required the precise manipulation of a lot more moving parts and, while the win was sweet, it has also left the lingering illusion that things could coalesce at any moment. That 2011 team did not look the part of a champion, pretty much until they were winning the championship. So why not Powell, Felton and McGee? Why couldn’t it happen for Zaza Pachulia, Matthews, and Villanueva?
The Mavericks have mostly played their offseason hands the same way since the title. Missing out on the marquee, they try to make the most of the marginal. That the strategy of assembling a menagerie of skilled veterans and then trying to summon lightning in a bottle has not proven replicable does nothing to dampen the optimism. The Mavericks that they were better than the rest of the league did and, lo and behold, they’ve gone out and proven it. In his Sunday Shootaround at SBNation, Paul Flannery wrote about the situation Dallas finds themselves in and the choice they’ve made:
“With Dirk all things have always seemed possible. There is no transitional rebuilding program in place for Dallas and no expectation of mentoring young prospects. The Mavericks are here to win for as long as Nowitzki can still play. When their offseason plans went awry, they quickly cobbled together a makeshift lineup full of veteran free agents with something to prove. There would be no retrenchment. Admirable as this strategy was, outside projections were not high mainly due to age, injury and a lack of familiarity.”
Nowitzki continues to be the binding agent but he also sets the agenda. There is the tremendous pressure not to waste one precious moment of his time on the court and so the only choice is to cling to optimism, to fight for every possession, to push through every limitation and to chase every win possible. There may not be another championship in his future but to bring that possibility onto the court, even for a second, is to admit defeat, regardless of what the score says.
The Mavericks have caught us off-guard again with their sorcerous ability to turn lemons into lemondade. But we shouldn’t be surprised at their desperate quest to squeeze every possible win out of this roster, and a few impossible ones as well. It’s all they have left.