The 2011 Mavericks are the answer to beating the Warriors

I know this feels different. I know it feels different for good reasons. Never before have the protagonists been so young — Kevin Durant, the elder statesman, is 29. Never before has one of the best players in the league, some days better than anybody else on the team, joined it after that team had one of the best seasons in NBA history. In his prime.

But nevertheless, the recent history of the NBA is a history of dominance. Some picture has been going around lately showing how much of basketball history, ringz-wise, can be incapsulated in the names Steph, LeBron, Kobe and Duncan. But if we’re honest, that’s child’s play. Since 1984 — which is to say, since less than a decade after the ABA-NBA merged — the names Bird, Magic, Michael, Kobe (and Shaq), Duncan, James and Steph cover all but eight years. You add Hakeem and Isiah, and you’re left with four years: the Pistons in 2003, the Heat in 2006, the Celtics in 2008 and the Mavericks in 2011.

There’s a lot to lament about the “ringz” culture, the “the great ones find a way to win it all” culture that owes itself likely much more to a bunch of Nike commercials than to anything passing for critical thought, but this is the worst: it’s insane. Nobody ever wins. Nobody unexpected ever pulls it off. Almost everything almost every NBA GM does, working feverishly on a draft board, working the phones ‘til they grow freakin’ hot in their hands, is pointless, if we measure it by rings.

Read More: NBA Finals Game 1: Warriors 124 – Cavaliers 114

There’s nothing to do but hope the next great team passes by and that by some act of the basketball gods, you’re next. I mean do you ever think about the great players and teams who, by the laws of narrative that we apply, should eventually have broken through but just never did? The 2000s especially were a graveyard of terrific teams — the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, the Webber-Peja-Vlade Kings, just to name the most prominent examples.

And this year, of course, will not be different. The Celtics and the Rockets gave us hope — though it’s worth mentioning that those two teams, unlike, say, the Trail Blazers or Raptors, are among those that have won in the last 25 years — but the end result is the same as it’s been for four years in a row. And, though the LeBron James Cavs have both LeBron James and a ring on the Jason Kidd Nets, this forth installment nevertheless seems more lopsided than ever.

But I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, in the pause before it happens (again) I want to talk about my own favorite team, and its break-through into this short-list. I want to talk about the 2011 Dallas Mavericks, one of the odd ones out, one of the brief intermissions in this history of dominance. And I want to say that there’s a missing counter-history of teams like these Mavs who, because they seem so unusual, therefore get written off.

The Mavs in particular suffer from this and get written off for a number of reasons that the other one-and-done teams don’t. The Pistons represent a special moment in time, the Celtics were a superstar team-up, the Heat had Dwyane Wade, and Shaq, for just a minute. The Mavs had …pretty much the same team they’d had for years, and also had to do a thing that none of the other one-and-done teams had to do: beat LeBron James in the Finals.

Ironically, since playoffs coverage is positively dripping with the notion that this or that team will finally “break through,” it actually happens so seldom that we don’t have the framework to understand it when it does, particularly when it’s not repeated the next year. It must, therefore, be something else. LeBron choked. The Mavs got good matchups. Jason Terry and J.J. Barea had really fluky runs. Or something.

It’s funny that people work so hard at this because there’s really nothing to explain. The Mavs simply were the best team that year, and had very probably spent years being just about one player away from that breakthrough. They got him in 2011 — Tyson Chandler — and the rest is history.

Consider this: in our memory of the 2000s, the Mavericks were, until they won, just one of those teams that threatened but never could overtake Shaq and Kobe, then Duncan and etc. But this already is an unfair characterization of a really unique run in the history of the league.

The Kings were good from 2000 to 2005, when they traded Chris Webber to the 76ers for, basically, nothing (Brian Skinner, Kenny Thomas and Corliss Williamson). They won 280 games in those five years, for an average of 56 a season and they certainly could have won a championship with a few more breaks.

The Suns were great from roughly 2005-2008, when the Suns traded Shawn Marion to the Heat for Shaq (and Marcus Banks). In that four year span, the Suns won 232 games, an average of 58 a season, and they, also, certainly could have won a championship with a few better breaks.

Between 2000 and 2005 — the Kings’ era of success — the Mavericks also won 280 games, good for 56 a season. Between 2005 and 2008, the Suns’ era, the Mavericks won 236, an average of 59 a year. That’s right. They were as good, or better, than the Kings and Suns when those teams were happening, and throughout the entire time both were happening.

And not only that. Between 2008, the end of the Suns’ era, and their championship in 2011, a period of three years, they won another 162 games, good for 54 a year. The Suns + the Kings + three, that’s what we’re talking about here. And then they had a winning record, including 50 win and 49 win seasons, for another four years after that. They had the bad luck to be playing in the shadow of the Spurs, both in the Western Conference and in the state of Texas, but there are basically no other examples of a run that hot for that long.

More than that, I’ve always thought that the Mavs could easily have had three championships. Everyone thinks that about their own team, no doubt, but of course the Mavs could and probably should have won in 2006. Fewer people are aware of 2003, when they won 60 games and took the Spurs to six games in the semifinals despite Dirk injuring his knee in Game 3 and having to sit out. The Dirk-less Mavs had a big lead after three quarters of Game 6, with Dirk scheduled to come back in Game 7, but got dominated in the final quarter (34-9). Since the Spurs went on to win the championship that year, who knows what might have happened?

But what about 2011? Well, as I said already, as unusual as it is for a team that seems like an also-ran to suddenly be the best team in the league, after so many years, there’s a pretty compelling case to be made. The Mavs won 57 games, which tied them with the Lakers for second best in the west, and put them just behind the Heat (58), Spurs (61) and Bulls (62) in terms of best records in the league. But, the Mavs lost Dirk to injury, midseason, for nine games, and went 2-7 in that span.

Then they lost another in which Dirk played only about 10 minutes, and then his first full game back from injury. If they’d won four of those seven, of course they’d have been tied for the best record in the West, and five would have tied them for the best record in the league, and if you say they went not 2-7 but 2-9 from the injury, well, you see what I mean. During the regular season they’d also already faced off against the Heat twice, both times in the middle of an enormous Heat run. Between Nov. 26, 2010 and Jan. 9, 2011, the Heat went on a ridiculous 22-2 run. Both losses were to the Mavericks.

In the playoffs, the Mavericks struggled against a long, ferocious Blazers team, but from the vantage point of seven years later it certainly doesn’t look that way. The Blazers won two games by five points and two points, the Mavericks won four by eight points, 12 points, 11 points and seven points. They dusted off 2010’s champion Lakers in four, then busted the Harden-Westbrook-Durant OKC Thunder in five.

In the first game of that series, Dirk put on one of the greatest offensive playoff performances I have ever seen, scoring 48 points on 15 shots. He went 12-15 from the floor, abusing a host of long, competent, physical defenders: Serge Ibaka, Nick Collison, even Kevin Durant. He went 24 for 24 from the line. For the game he had a true shooting percentage of 93.9 percent and an effective field goal percentage of 80 percent. In the second to last game of the series, OKC had a 99-87 lead with 3:49 to go, after which Dirk scored 11 points in 3:15 to send it to overtime where the Mavericks won by seven.

Today, when people talk about that Finals in light of what LeBron has done since, they say it was a fluke and they say he choked. I think that’s grossly unfair both to LeBron and to the Mavs. For one thing, again, out of eight total games the Mavs had against the Heat that year, regular season and playoffs, the Mavs won six.

For another, saying LeBron today would have been able to do, in that series, what he couldn’t do then isn’t actually sign of anything. People do get better, especially in terms of basketball IQ, being able to break down defenses, it’s not a crime. Dirk himself did. LeBron was 26 years old in 2011, Dirk was 28 when the Warriors bounced the Mavs from the first round of the playoffs. It does happen. I don’t know why people have such a hard time imagining that Shawn Marion and Tyson Chandler, of all people, along with Jason Kidd and DeShawn Stevenson, could have given the younger LeBron the fits he obviously had against them just because they were very good at defense and he hadn’t yet become a basketball god.

But most of all, like I say, I think people simply don’t have room in their hearts and minds for the potential that a really good team may be one piece away, as the Mavericks so clearly were. People want winning to be metaphysical rather than physical, they want teams to either have “it” or not to have “it.” They want championships to happen through will, not talent, and so a team finally having enough talent, and thus revealing the will that was apparently always there, seems to short-circuit the entire philosophy the Nike commercial wants to sell us.

Indeed, it hurts on some level to think that Jordan didn’t just win because he wanted to, but because he had Pippen and a lot of additional talent, and nobody poses a bigger problem to that worldview than LeBron himself who somehow seems to be clutch enough to have dragged good teams and bad to the Finals, year after year, for eight years now, but not clutch enough to have won even half of those times. It is by far most likely that in a couple of weeks, despite another superhuman effort, LeBron will be 3-5 in NBA Finals. We leave it to Skip Bayless to make sense of that, preferably by screeching through a megaphone a long, drawn out, inhuman howl of rage.

All that aside, however, the larger message here is one of comfort, or at least it should be. People want to think the Raptors just don’t have “it,” or that the Pacers can’t do it next year or that there’s no point in even trying to compete with the anointed “nexts” — the Celtics, the Sixers, maybe even the Jazz. From the history of the NBA, it’s most likely that all of that is true — that everybody but the best current teams will end up like the Suns or Kings, and that from all the people trying to be next, one or two will succeed and the rest will never break through.

But it still remains possible, as Dallas and at least Detroit show, for a team that nobody was thinking about to suddenly put it together in a big way. Not because of a fluke, not because they got hot at the right time, but because there are teams out there that are talented enough that all they need is one more piece to be the best. The really weird thing about the Mavs isn’t that they finally won, after everybody had forgotten about them, but that even though they didn’t win for so long they didn’t give into the temptation to say this is definitely not going to work, we definitely need to blow it up. They kept their core, added talent when they could and finally broke through.

Next: The influential curses and blessings of the BasedGod

The NBA would be a much more interesting place if more people believed that was possible, and in fact, if it seemed to be more possible. It may happen sooner than you think.