The Mavericks only have three starters and it’s working okay

Let me tell you something you don’t know about the Dallas Mavericks, and not just because you don’t really care about one of the worst teams in the league. Although, yes, also that. The Dallas Mavericks, right now, have three starters and a six man bench.

Most teams have five starters, of course, but the Mavericks tried that, and it didn’t go very well. Since they gave up on such hide-bound, even quaint notions, they have thrived. I mean, you know “thrived.” They’re still like .500 over their last eight games, but since they started out 2-14 and have been in every single one of those eight games, I think it’s fair to say there’s some relatively significant thriveage going on.

But what do I mean? Just this: over the last eight games or so, only Harrison Barnes, Wes Matthews and Dennis Smith can really be said to have played “starters minutes.” Smith is sometimes on the low end and Dirk Nowitzki, an extraordinary sixth man, sometimes on the high end, but for by far the most part in that span Barnes, Smith and Matthews play around 30 minutes or more and everybody else plays around 20.

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“Everybody” else in this case is J.J. Barea, Yogi Ferrell, Devin Harris, Dwight Powell and surprising starter-playing-backup-minutes Maxi Kleber. Early on in the season, Yogi was also playing a lot of minutes, but that’s cooled down a bit. He had 34 eight games ago, and 37 recently against the Celtics, but in between it’s 25, 21, 22, 21, 24.

What makes the six-man-bench (these guys plus Dirk) surprising is its consistency. Not one of these guys has failed to reach double digit minutes in the last eight games, and, besides Dirk, the other five have nabbed more than 26 minutes only four times combined in the same span. In fact, the span is really quite a bit narrower than that. Of the 40 minute-total accrued by the five guys most commonly seen on the bench, 29 times somebody’s had between 15 and 24 minutes.

In a way, this all feels familiar. In the old days, when the Mavericks were good, a deep bench was also a hallmark of the team, and in fact, many of those same players were on that bench. Jason Terry was its star, of course, but young Devin Harris was there before his stint in Atlanta; young J.J. Barea before he was with the Timberwolves. The championship team also had bench studs like Peja Stojakovic and DeShawn Stevenson, as well as dirty work experts like Ian Mahinmi and the janitor himself, Brian Cardinal.

But, in other ways, the situation was strictly opposite. The Mavericks never had the talent of the other good teams of the 2000s in concentrated form, only ever commanding one all-world player, but they had so many good players, after Dirk, that they overwhelmed you. Now, the Mavericks are doing what they’re doing because they more or less don’t have any. Coach Rick Carlisle seems to have made the decision that if he can’t have any one good unit to put out there, they might as well be consistently okay.

The other thing that’s interesting about this is that for the first time since the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Mavericks starters are young. I’m not math guy, but with Smith just 20 years of age, Barnes, 25, and Matthews, 31, this crop of linchpins comes in, average wise, roughly 4000 years younger than the great Mavericks teams of the 2000s.

All of which means that this Mavericks team might not really be absolutely terrible. Pretty soon they’ll add Seth Curry back which, while he’s no Steph (or Masaman) Curry, actually scored around 13 points a game last year while having better shooting percentages than yer man in Golden State. And, the 27-year-old Curry got better as the season went along — last March, he averaged 14.6 a game on an excellent .494/.416/.906 shooting split.

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One imagines, if he can stay on the court, that he will take his place as the Mavericks’ fourth starter and it will actually be pretty potent offensively. And if they’re winning roughly half their games now, who knows how many they might win once that happens – 53 percent? 54? The sky’s the limit for this team.