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Dallas will need Davis at his best to have any hope of a surprise playoff run.
According to the math, there is almost a 100 percent chance you will have the opportunity to watch the Mavericks in a single-game elimination contest against one of three Western Conference foes. It feels like a fitting rite of passage that in this the year of The Trade, the franchise will earn its first play-in berth, competing in the event everyone is talking about, the 2025 SoFi Play-In Tournament. Someone should stylize that meme of Adam Silver telling Patrick Dumont, “You better get ready to learn Play-In, buddy.” Because after the near horizon, the Mavericks will either be in a full-on tank (following a Nico Harrison exit, l would imagine) or a team lost in the NBA wilderness. But that will be for then.
For now, this version of the Mavericks has six games over the next two weeks to prepare to face one of the Timberwolves, Warriors, or Clippers in the play-in. No matter what camp you fall into as a fan, or just someone with strong opinions about the Mavericks and the NBA, the emotional experience of that game is will be a strange one. I simultaneously want as much professional and economic pain and hardship for the Mavericks ownership as legally possible while also finding myself incapable of wanting P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford to lose games. Ride-or-die Mavericks fans will surely be all-in on rooting for success, but even those fans will have the sting of what could have been had Kyrie Irving not been lost for the season. None of us will know how we will feel about any of this until the ball tips.
Anthony Davis has now played in four of the last five games since returning from injury, missing only a back-to-back. The Mavericks beat a few bad teams in AD’s first few games back, then on Monday night lost to a bad team it had routed a week earlier. That’s what average teams do. Gafford was a force in his limited return, gutting it out through pain down the stretch (unrelated to his previous injury). He’s a welcome sight, and the return of Dereck Lively II in the next few games would move the needle a bit more. Davis may be playing, but he is clearly not fully healthy. Perhaps 10 days will make a difference? Unfortunately, the Mavericks have basically zero time to gel with this group of available players as they attempt to give themselves a chance at a moonshot of a playoff run.
We don’t have much data to go on since Davis’ return, but the numbers we do have paint a reliable enough picture to make some assumptions. Before The Trade, the Mavericks were built to win in multiple ways offensively, but the point of the offense was pretty clear: generate open threes for reliable shooters. Last season, the Mavericks finished second in the share of their shots that came from deep; first in corner threes. While they were the second-most accurate team at the rim last year, they were near the bottom of the league in the percentage of shots they took there. Luka Doncic either generated a three, took a step-back, or took a long mid-range shot, and the rest went to the bigs or Luka driving.
After the trade and the injuries, with no bigs, and not much shooting, the Mavericks went on the attack. (Of course, the ability to play this way after adding to the roster was one reason why it felt like Dallas had a better playoff roster with Luka, considering it was less reliant on shooting against great defenses. But we digress. ) In his piece, Josh Bowe posed the question of how the slashing Mavericks would blend styles with the return of two starting-caliber bigs. So far, the offense has continued to look for shots in the paint, as the drives per game numbers have stayed fairly high.
But one area of the offense has disappeared: the Mavericks now take the fewest threes per possession in the league. This has mostly been a piece-by-piece dismantling by the front office, obviously starting with Doncic. The injury to Irving was a huge blow in this regard, as was the departure of four of five attempts from deep by Quentin Grimes. (Caleb Martin is averaging 0.9 attempts from beyond the arc in his nine games.) The numbers have slowly dwindled since February, and over the last four games, the Mavericks are a distant last in frequency of three-point attempts. And I mean, distant; league average is 39 percent, and the Mavericks sit at 28. Boston, the only team to shoot the three more often than Dallas last year, has gone the other way, with half percent of its shots coming from three.
Good teams, like the Celtics and the Mavericks in a previous life, can win games by exposing any defensive weakness. And when you stop that, they have countless counters. Average teams tend to rely on threes and a high level of variance to beat more complete teams, as it is typically the only route available. It is easier to find a player who can shoot a little above average on open threes than it is even an average shot creator, or a big who can score. The Mavs don’t have a ton in the way of shooting. But they do have Naji Marshall and Spencer Dinwiddie, who don’t need the three to have an impact. They also have the Davis-Gafford-Lively triumvirate, who are to varying degrees more than one-trick-pony bigs.
In the five games since Davis’ return, although the three has disappeared, the Mavericks have jumped to third in the league in frequency at the rim and eighth in mid-range share (where they are, predictably, one of the more accurate teams in the league). One issue for the offense is you aren’t simply adding Davis pick-and-rolls, isos, and post-ups on top of Gafford and Lively dunks. Some of the former possessions will take away from the latter, and on balance, the dunk is a better shot. The Mavericks are not going to “figure this out” in the next 15 days.
But if I were to make the case for the Mavericks at least being “dangerous” despite the bad loss to the Nets, it would be that this is, if nothing else, a veteran team. Davis and Kidd are very familiar with one another, and while that is often discussed in terms of defensive allyship, it helps on the other end as well. Klay Thompson is shooting fewer threes and shooting them poorly in lineups with two bigs, but he’s still Klay Thompson. If Maxi Kleber can swing a big game with hot shooting, so can 2025 Klay Thompson.
It might seem a bit counterintuitive: teams that shoot a ton of threes to compensate for a lack of doing so are indeed playing a high-variance game, but those teams tend to struggle against playoff defenses. The Mavs too are counting on their own hypothetical defensive prowess to come to life down the stretch for sure. But this all begins and ends with figuring out how to score right now.
It’s an interesting situation for the front office and coaching staff. Davis was candid in admirable comments about there being no question he would return when healthy enough. But it remains to be seen how right he can get his body over the next handful of games. The reality is this, however: the Mavericks can only beat one of those three teams in the play-in and avoid utter destruction in the first round if Davis plays at the level he did in Los Angeles for the last 100 games, or in the first half of his first game in Dallas. No one knows if we’ll see that again this season. At the very least, it feels far away at the moment.
It’s in there, though. The only chance the Mavericks have of air-frying a capable offense in the next two weeks revolves around Davis. The truth is, that’s most likely going to be the case for some time into the future. Even when Irving returns, the challenge of recovering from a torn ACL at age 33 will make this the Davis show for the foreseeable future. There simply cannot be stretches where you forget if Davis is on the floor unless you’re looking for him, as was the case in the Brooklyn loss.
Dumont and Harrison got their wish, and their prized possession is back in the starting lineup for a playoff push. If Davis is merely a passenger on that ride, which has not been uncommon at times in his career, the Mavericks have no shot, now and in the future.
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Jake Kemp
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Jake Kemp covers the Cowboys and Mavericks for StrongSide. He is a lifelong Dallas sports fan who previously worked for…