NBA FINALS PREVIEW, PART 2
Don’t Believe in Alchemy? Then You Haven’t Watched Basketball
The Dallas Mavericks have been one of the NBA’s best roller coaster rides
In Part 1 of my NBA Finals Preview, I analyzed how the league has changed and the place magic plays in the sport.
Even in the age of 3-pointer roulette, defense still wins championships.
In 2020, Jason Kidd was an assistant coach with the Lakers under Frank Vogel the year they won the title in the Orlando bubble. He learned that a defense can only afford to have one defensive weakness on the floor at any time. In the summer of 2021, Dallas hired him as the head coach.
Kidd turned the Mavs into a top-10 defense and led them to the 2022 Western Conference Finals by upsetting 64-win, title favorite Phoenix in a devastating Game 7 rout that caused the Suns to explode. (Remember that number 64 for later.)
But disrespecting star players can turn a franchise into a lottery team.
Dallas stumbled, refusing to give Jalen Brunson a reasonable offer and lost him in free agency to the Knicks. In New York, he has transformed into a franchise-level player, making second-team All-NBA and finishing fifth in MVP voting (now regarded as an absolute steal at $26 million per year).
Dallas was a terrible defensive team, barely above .500 at the 2023 trade deadline, and risked a massive gamble to fill the hole left by the loss of Brunson. They traded Dorian Finney-Smith, their best 3 and D wing, and Spencer Dinwiddie, a fantastic sixth man now playing out of position, for the brilliant offense of temperamental Kyrie Irving.
Dallas slid even further, dropping to 11th. The team feared that franchise player Luka Doncic would request a trade if they couldn’t build the right team around him.
They were so bad that year they couldn’t even conceal tanking their second-to-last game, in the hopes of keeping their top-10 protected first-round draft pick. Ironically, they didn’t need to tank as they were one game behind Oklahoma City who had won their season series. The NBA fined them $750,000.
I guess the basketball gods didn’t punish them for their one-game crime, based on the way the franchise turned around in a year.
The first step in their rebuild was to clear salary and roster space to find the right young talent. They did this by making a deal with Oklahoma City, sending the number ten pick in the draft, and the awful contract of Davis Bertans for the number twelve pick. They drafted Derek Lively II, regarded as the second-best rim protector behind Victor Wembenyama. (NBA teams surround stars with role players who can make 3-pointers and defend, hence the term “3 and D.” Bertans can shoot but can’t defend, so he’s a 3 and D with no “D”.)
The next step in their rebuild was the free agent signing of Derek Jones, Jr. in summer free agency. Jones Jr. is athletic (he won an NBA Slam Dunk contest), long (6'7" tall with a 7'0" wing span), and an elite defensive wing who bounced around the NBA because he was a 3 and D player with no 3. It took eight seasons to work on his shot and a gamble on himself by taking a veteran minimum contract to find a place in an NBA starting lineup.
The 2023–2024 season started, and while Doncic and Irving worked better together on offense, the team continued to struggle.
Before the February 8 trade deadline, the Mavs were 11–11 without Kyrie Irving and 23–17 with him. They were in 8th place on a 45-win pace, going nowhere, with a top-10 offense and a bottom-10 defense.
What they did next opens a window into the future of building a contender under the new restrictive salary cap.
No guts, no glory: Dallas pushed all their chips into the table.
While teams like Denver, Oklahoma City, and the Lakers did nothing to address their roster deficiencies, Dallas went all in.
And the basketball gods smiled.
In two of the best moves ever at the fringes, turned two first-round picks and three role players into two starters.
First, they traded for P.J. Washington, a big forward who could defend, shoot from the outside a little (.366 3P% in his first four seasons), rebound, and run. It was also a case of addition by subtraction as they jettisoned Grant Williams, an all-world trash-talker and instigator. They are happy to have a guy that distracts opponents. But they aren’t so forgiving when that same player annoys the franchise superstar.
They also traded Seth Curry, a gifted shooter but a terrible defensive liability who gets played off the floor in the playoffs.
Next, Dallas GM Nico Harrison found a steal in Daniel Gafford, an elite rim-protecting defensive center languishing on one of the worst teams in the league in exchange for a smaller, less talented defensive center and a first-round pick.
Suddenly, the Mavs had three young, athletic defenders to go with an unstoppable superstar in Doncic and the inspired offensive bursts of Irving.
And that’s where the alchemy comes in.
Magical things happen when five players blend the right skill sets on the court, but it has to be at the right time, against the right match ups.
After the February 8 trade deadline, Dallas started Washington, while Gafford came off the bench. The team only won half of its next ten games.
But on March 7 in their 63rd game of the season, the Dallas Mavericks added Gafford to the starting lineup and became the best team in basketball.
If you look at the box scores, you won’t see big changes before and after that magical day.
Jones Jr. averaged two minutes less per game, Washington averaged one more minute, and Gafford played seven more.
But over the next 18 games*, the Mavs starters went a league-best 16–2 (one loss came when Luka Doncic sat out).
And they had the #1 defense.
Somehow, the Dallas starters posted these 5-man lineup ratings (ranked on a minimum of 100 minutes):
Doncic-Irving-Jones-Washington-Gafford: 115 Offensive Rating, 98.9 Defensive Rating (#2), 16.1 Net Rating (#3).
What changed? The answer is alchemy.
And they were rewarded with a run to the NBA Finals.
Thanks for reading. Look for Part 3 tomorrow.
The gods demand, “Here’s to better basketball.”
FOOTNOTES:
*After clinching their playoff spot, they rested their starters in the last two games of the season, so I did not include those games in calculating their team efficiency.
