DALLAS — It was all good just a week ago. The Dallas Mavericks had been flying high with a seven-game winning streak, bolstered by trade deadline acquisitions that seemed to mesh perfectly with their superstar duo. They beat the Oklahoma City Thunder before the All-Star break, the Phoenix Suns after it. They had earned attention, deserved it.
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Now, after Tuesday’s 137-120 defeat to the Indiana Pacers, its fifth loss in six games, Dallas has entered a perilous free fall that threatens its season. It warrants profound questions about this team and where it’s headed.
Before Tuesday’s game, coach Jason Kidd invoked championship contention. “We’re trying to build a championship team, and it’s not easy,” Kidd said. “Dallas has not talked about that for a long time. So to talk about that, it’s pretty cool. We weren’t able to talk about that last year, or the year before. To be able to build it takes time.”
During the seven-game streak, the Mavericks generated brief buzz that they might be dark-horse contenders. But after Tuesday’s loss, they more resemble last season’s catastrophic failure to even make the Play-In Tournament than the flawed unit that surprisingly reached the 2022 conference finals.
“We’ve got the personnel,” Kidd said Tuesday night. “We got the team. This is actually a great test for us to be able to go through a hard time in March, because it only gets harder in April and May and June.”
Kidd might be resorting to coachspeak – which his players have clearly heard; many of them have used phrases like, “we’re the team being hunted,” in recent interviews. But the comments belie the team’s recent results. The Mavericks’ ability to survive the first half of April is now in question — they’re just a half-game ahead of the ninth-place Los Angeles Lakers — never mind any talk of June.
Since the All-Star break, Dallas has the league’s worst defense. It’s not even close: The team’s 126 points allowed per 100 possessions is almost four points worse than the Washington Wizards.
“We tried everything,” Kidd said. “We switched, switched to hit, we went zone. Give (Indiana) credit. It’s about the rotations, not giving up the corner 3, which we have been here.”
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Let’s start there, then. Dallas has allowed 10.6 corner 3s per game this season, the league’s fifth most, which has leapt to 11.4 (fourth most) since the trade deadline. The Mavericks weren’t punished for allowing those shots during their seven-game winning streak. Since the losses began, though, opponents are hitting about half of them.
Dallas builds its scheme around hiding Luka Dončić, a generational offensive savant who tallied 39 more points in Tuesday’s defeat, along with 10 rebounds and 11 assists. Lately, the perpetual seesaw of defensive schemes that opponents try against him has trended toward fewer blitzes and double teams in an attempt to make him a scorer. He remains impossible to defend.
“Are we asking too much?” Kidd said. “I don’t know if we’re asking. This is what he does.”
But huge offensive performances from Dončić aren’t resulting in wins.
Dončić, unfortunately, is one of the reasons. Even in a scheme that attempts to hide his defensive shortcomings, Dončić cannot be a non-participant. Take, for example, the drop pick-and-roll coverage that Dallas uses with its traditional big men despite its ineffectiveness this season. According to Second Spectrum data acquired by The Athletic, Dallas has allowed the league’s most points per possession by far (1.08) when using that scheme. Here’s one example of it failing against the Pacers.
JALEN SMITH PUT THEM ON A POSTER 🤯 pic.twitter.com/iMXZwfpfDh
— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) March 6, 2024
Dallas’ coaching staff falls back on this specific coverage often. The team envisions its guards swimming over screens, preventing pull-up 3s and rejoining the play in time to prevent further damage, while its big men stay back. Daniel Gafford, who started over rookie Dereck Lively II against the Pacers, set up with a poor angle to allow Jalen Smith’s dunk, the type of breakdown that happens several times every game. Kyrie Irving, hidden on the opposite corner shooter, made a rotation to the rim that had virtually no effect due to his size. The much bigger Dončić, however, never left the player he was responsible for in the right corner. Who knows if his rotation would have made any impact, but it was one of many he never even attempted Tuesday.
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Dončić also played 34 straight minutes, starting the second quarter and not leaving the court during game action until the bench was emptied with two minutes remaining. As opponents dare him to carry even more of a scoring burden — he’s responded by averaging 37.3 points over his last seven games — those duties appear to have taken a toll on his defensive efforts.
Kidd declined to single out Dončić when asked if he needed to be better, saying, “We all do.”
“When you look at leaning on Luka offensively to deliver, and he does, we have to be able to cover him,” Kidd said. “And cover not just Luka, but (Kyrie).”
Irving has shared fault for the team’s defensive struggles, too, which creates a difficult situation for any coach. Dallas has the league’s fourth-best offense since the All-Star break, but it’s an offense that requires Dončić and Irving to play heavy minutes. (Tim Hardaway Jr.’s struggles had been blamed, somewhat rightly but also slightly unfairly, for the team’s recent stretch of defeats, but he played only 13 minutes in Tuesday’s game.) Irving’s defensive problems are freelancing too much and simply being small, different than Dončić’s inactivity. But they contribute to the same problem. When the team’s two best offensive players both need to be covered up on defense, a delicate mix of lineups and personnel are required to make up for them.
Kidd has often said that the team’s offense is its best defense. Dallas allows 115 points per 100 possessions after it makes a field goal, which ranks 17th, an average mark that would be happily accepted. After missed shots, though, Dallas concedes 123 points per 100 possessions, the league’s fourth-worst mark. Because the Mavericks shoot the second-most 3s in the league, and because the team’s trade deadline moves have made them a worse 3-point shooting team, they have even more possessions every game with a limited amount of time to properly set up their defense. Dončić bears some fault for that with his frequent complaints to officials, even if he’s far from the lone cause.
Another reason is schematic. Dallas’ best defenders are its worst offensive players who often set up in the corner, so they must travel the farthest distance to recover back to the court’s other side. Dončić often passes to them when he’s driving to the rim, carrying him past the baseline, an even farther place from which to run back. Or, he shoots stepback 3-pointers above the 3-point line’s break, making him the player nearest to the opponent’s rim when he misses. Irving, too, is the other player most often above the 3-point line when a possession ends with a miss. Dallas’ transition defense is a complicated problem with no great answers.
Kidd, clearly, hasn’t found the right solutions. This is a common problem; many coaches are tasked with scheming around superstars who carry heavy offensive burdens. And while there aren’t many defensive duos less formidable than Dončić and Irving, they’ve been an even more sensational scoring partnership that makes it worth building a complementary roster around.
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Dallas’ might not be perfect, but for the second straight year, the team made win-now acquisitions at the trade deadline to try to make it more suited for Kidd. Due to that, blame must fall on him.
“Our energy has been off since the All-Star Game, and we have to get back to that,” he said after Tuesday’s game.
But that’s been true for several games, and he still hasn’t found what’s needed to fix it. At practice on Monday, the team had what Kidd described as a “great film session” that focused on defensive communication and consistent effort. It didn’t translate against Indiana.
Teams are beating the Mavericks in predictable ways. They’re wearing out Dončić, forcing him and Irving to defend while betting that the duo’s teammates can’t hurt them enough as long as they’re not left completely alone. That was true, again, on Tuesday. Because Dallas does have a talented team, one of its deepest in the six-year Dončić era, it should look better than this. It should make what Kidd says about contention seem plausible, if slightly hyperbolic, rather than nonsensical.
Dallas should be better than this even with an incongruous roster that features traditional big men best suited for a pick-and-roll coverage the team has consistently failed at and primary point-of-attack defenders ill-suited to navigate the screens they’re asked to face. They should be better even though P.J. Washington, the team’s marquee addition at the deadline, seems to pair better with incumbent Maxi Kleber than the promising young center they drafted in the lottery or the one that cost a first-round pick swap to acquire. The team should be better because Dončić, despite defensive flaws, is undeniably one of the league’s best players being asked to do too much on both ends. They should be better, point blank, no excuses.
There are 20 games remaining this season. Kidd will be given those games to prove he can find answers, whether they are schematic ways to better amplify this roster’s strengths, motivational ones that bring more out of his players or rotational solutions that minimize the issues that have plagued the team during this horrendous stretch.
Beyond that, though, the franchise and its decision makers understand the urgency that comes with Dončić’s eminence.
It can’t continue like this, and this team is running out of changes it can make.
(Top photo: Jerome Miron / USA Today)