Luka Doncic's High Praise for Dallas Mavs Star Rookie Dereck Lively II: 'They're Really Afraid of Him'
As the Dallas Mavericks attempt to string together consecutive wins for the first time since Nov. 12 on Friday night against the Portland Trail Blazers, the importance of rookie starting center Dereck Lively II and his chemistry with superstar Luka Doncic continues to grow.
The 19-year-old lottery pick out of Duke is having a fantastic debut season, averaging 8.7 points, 7.6 rebounds and 1.6 blocks through 18 games. He's shooting 72.9 percent from the field, and he's been committed to doing the "dirty work," something he told DallasBasketball.com during the summer that he was planning on doing.
It's one thing to have a productive rookie season while learning on the fly, but it's another thing to be feared by opponents, and Doncic believes Mavs opponents are already starting to feel that way about Lively.
"He's great," Doncic said of Lively after the Mavs decimated the Utah Jazz, 147-97 on Wednesday night. "Obviously, he has a great potential, and he already is a great player, but now you see how they're really afraid of him, so they put a smaller guy on him, so we don't play pick-and-roll – me and him – but we managed that well. Like today, we were going after their 5s, so we just managed that well."
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As Lively's game has grown through the first quarter of this season, both Doncic and Mavs head coach Jason Kidd have encouraged him to be more aggressive when trying to score the ball. Lively will always get some easy buckets when running pick-and-rolls with Doncic, but when that's not there, he still has the ability to make good things happen on offense. He showed this last weekend against the Oklahoma City Thunder, when he finished with an impressive stat line of 20 points, 16 rebounds and seven blocks while shooting 9-9 from the field.
“Yeah, at halftime I told [Lively] don’t look to pass, go finish," Kidd said. "I thought he did a great job with that because he is a willing passer, so that will make the game easier as it goes. If you can’t finish, he’s going to have wide open guy in either corner, so I thought he did a great job there in the second half.”
It's sometimes hard to believe that Lively is only 19 years old, given how mature he is both on and off the court. But with great physical attributes, great basketball IQ and great mentors in his corner, Lively has been put in the ideal situation to excel from from jump, and he's taken full advantage of that so far.
"I'm just focused on making sure that we're able to gel well, and we're able to have chemistry, and just be able to be the most coachable player on the floor,” Lively told DallasBasketball.com over the summer.
“There's a lot of things that, basketball, on the court and off the court, depends on us being teammates. So I know we're young, we have some new faces. I just want to be able to gel well and have good chemistry so we can play well together."
So far, Lively has done everything he said he was going to do before the season began, and the Mavs are experiencing the benefits of that. Dallas is 12-8 heading into Friday's game in Portland, but that record is 12-6 when Lively has been available to play. The Mavs are currently fifth in the Western Conference through 20 games, just a half-game out of fourth place and four games back of the top-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves.
