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Dallas Mavs' Luka Doncic is Officially Eligible for MVP & All-NBA Honors After Win Over Houston Rockets
For Dallas Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic to have a chance to win his first MVP award, he first has to become eligible for said award ... and that's exactly what happened on Sunday night as Dallas dismantled the Houston Rockets' 11-game win streak with a 125-107 blowout.
This season, the NBA set new criteria for players to be eligible for major awards at the end of the year. With Sunday's game, Doncic reached the 65-game mark to qualify him for not only the MVP award, but also All-NBA honors. Doncic has four consecutive All-NBA First Team selections, and whether he wins his first MVP or not, one has to believe he's a lock to make it five consecutive All-NBA First Team honors.
When Doncic receives those All-NBA honors again, he will also be eligible to sign a five-year, $346 million super max contract extension with the Mavs during the 2025 offseason, which would be the richest in NBA history (h/t Bobby Marks).
Doncic is playing the best basketball of his career, as he's averaging a league-leading and career-high 34.0 points, 9.1 rebounds, 9.8 assists and 1.5 steals while shooting 48.9 percent from the field, 38.0 percent from deep and 78.2 percent from the free-throw line. He picked a good time to take his game to new heights, as this Mavs' roster is the best one he's had around him during his six seasons in the league.
The Mavs have won 11 of their last 12 games, and the only loss during that span came on a second night of a back-to-back in Oklahoma City with Doncic not playing due to heel soreness. After their win in Houston, the Mavs are now the No. 5 seed in the Western Conference standings for the time being, passing up the New Orleans Pelicans. Home-court advantage isn't out of the question yet, either, as the Mavs need to win three more games than the Los Angeles Clippers over the final eight games of the season to get the No. 4 seed.
Dallas, with trade-deadline acquisitions Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington settling in, looks like a legitimate title contender, and although Doncic would be happy to win his first MVP this season, that's not the prestigious hardware he's got his sights set on.
DALTON TRIGG
Dalton Trigg is the Editor-In-Chief for Dallas Basketball, as well as the Executive Editor overseeing Inside The Rockets, Inside The Spurs, All Knicks, and The Magic Insider. He is the founder and host for the Mavs Step Back Podcast, which is a proud part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Trigg graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi’s College of Business and Economic Development with a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship in 2016. After spending a few years with multiple Dallas Mavericks-related blogs, including SB Nation’s Mavs Moneyball, Trigg joined DallasBasketball.com as a staff writer in 2018 and never looked back. At the start of 2022, he was promoted to the EIC title he holds now. Through the years, Trigg has conducted a handful of high-profile one-on-one interviews to add to his resume — in both writing and podcasting. Some of his biggest interviews have been with Mavs owner Mark Cuban, Mavs GM Nico Harrison, now-retired legend Dirk Nowitzki and many other current/former players and team staffers. Many of those interviews and other articles by Trigg have been aggregated by other well-known sports media websites, such as Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, Bleacher Report and others. You can find Trigg on all major social media channels, but his most prevalent platform is on Twitter. Whether it’s posting links to his DBcom work, live-tweeting Mavs games or merely giving his opinions on things going on with Dallas and the rest of the NBA, the daily content never stops rolling. For any inquiries, please email Dalton@MavsStepBack.com.