The Dallas Mavericks have won four of their last five games, with the only blemish coming against the Oklahoma City Fully Operational Death Star, and those wins include victories over the Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets.
In a related story, Ryan Nembhard took over as the Mavs’ starting point guard six games ago, and he has immediately helped everything click for what had been among the NBA’s most constipated offenses.
To wit, Dallas had cleared the 110-point mark just nine times in its first 19 games but has done so in all six games Nembhard started. He scored 28 points on 12-of-14 shooting and added 10 assists in a shocking win at Denver, and then came back two days later to put up 15 and 13 as the Mavs beat the Miami Heat.
Nembhard, who measured 5-foot-11 without shoes at the NBA Draft Combine, went undrafted out of Gonzaga because of concerns about both his size and shooting; he’s five inches shorter than his brother, Indiana Pacers’ guard Andrew Nembhard, and thus has to play a different style of game.
Nonetheless, there are some parallels that track here: undervalued guards out of Gonzaga with tremendous instincts and basketball IQs to offset unremarkable physical tools.
Nembhard has also been good at avoiding mismatches of his own where possible. While his height is sometimes an unfixable disadvantage, his IQ helps him stay out of trouble.
What makes this all work, however, is that Nembhard has been better than advertised at the offensive end. He has a penchant for one-handed layups on the run to take away shot-blockers and has softened the shooting questions so far by hitting 15 of 28 from 3. The shooting piece is still something to monitor — he was a reluctant and not-very-accurate shooter at both Creighton and Gonzaga, shooting 34.7 percent for his college career and only attempting 94 in 35 games in his senior year — and played much more as a passer than a scorer.
More importantly, those passing instincts haven’t gone away. Anthony Davis has been the biggest beneficiary.
However, where the Mavs have really benefited is from the fact that defenses haven’t been able to cheat off Nembhard as a scorer. Stay tuned — we’ve got a small sample of games and minutes so far — but Nembhard is at 65.8 percent true shooting on non-trivial usage.
If he can keep that up, it’s amazing what it does for the rest of the Mavs lineup. This team had been starving all year for a real point guard, and is now able to play much faster than it did when it tried huge lineups at the start of the year.
With Davis also forced by other injuries to play his real position (center), the Mavs finally look coherent. Cooper Flagg can play off the ball and looks a thousand times more comfortable, P.J. Washington can play his natural four spot, Brandon Williams can come off the bench and hunt buckets without looking to get other guys involved, and playing D’Angelo Russell becomes optional.
Let’s not get too carried away — Dallas is still 9-16 with the league’s 30th-ranked offense. But the mere fact of having a real point guard can go a long way toward helping the Mavs evaluate the rest of their roster, ahead of what’s likely to be a very active post-Nico Harrison trade deadline. Finding him in the undrafted scrap heap was tremendous work by Harrison’s staff.