Monday Mavs Donuts: From Dwight's Injury to True Bryant Tragedy, This Week Sucks
The Dallas Mavericks' week included some small joys ... but then moments ranging from unfortunate to tragic. Monday Mavs Donuts will attempt to comfort itself by starting with basketball ...
DONUT 1: Jazz 112, Mavericks 107
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The Dallas Mavericks on Saturday in Utah built a double-digit lead. They handed it back in about 90 seconds. Then, they played a top team down to the wire, trading leads in the final two minutes, before coming up empty down the stretch and losing a close one.
Utah rallied to improve to 14-1 over their last 15 games, and the Mavericks continued to lose close games to teams at the top of the NBA hierarchy. The Mavericks are clearly within a few bounces of some of the best teams in this league ... but it may take more than a mid-season trade to move the needle this season.
Check out Dalton’s game story here.
DONUT 2: This Sucks
The NBA season is a lot of good and a lot of bad, but it’s usually within the narrow focus of team success. Wins, losses, accolades, and regressions - you can usually quantify the good and bad with a nifty stat and just keep flowing through the jet stream of the season.
What happened to Dwight Powell is outside of that stream. It’s only about basketball in the tertiary way that it has to be because it happened on a basketball court. Beyond that, it’s about all the work that preceded it being wiped away by a single excruciating ripple of muscle and time.
Guys come back from it - these days more than ever, maybe 10 months? - but it’s a long and difficult recovery. It’ll cost Dwight at least a season of pure recovery. It’ll cost even more in rehabilitation as he works himself back into game shape. The greatest cost of all, however, is time. An NBA career is rarely a long one. For a guy who had to fight tooth-and-nail for every inch of his career, it’s already been longer than some would’ve predicted.
I have no doubt that Dwight, who works his ass off more than any recent Maverick not named Dirk, will put in the work it takes to get back on the court. TJ feels the same. But he cannot speed up the process. Science, medicine, and the human body will have their say, and Dwight’s will, no matter how strong, will have to be patient.
Then, he will have to trust his body again one day to hold up where once it failed.
At the moment, the Dwight news seemed like "the worst'' ...
DONUT 3: Some Good News
Kristaps Porzingis is back. He had a rough shooting night against the Clippers last Tuesday, but still finished with 10 points and nine rebounds. More importantly, he played an encouraging 27 minutes in a tight loss. (Coverage here, with KP taking the blame.) His night against Portland on Friday was better all-around. In 25 minutes he had 20 points on 6-of-11 shooting, five rebounds, an assist, a steal, a couple of blocks, and did a good job of taking care of the basketball. ... and Dallas won. (Game story here.)
Against the Jazz, despite a media-friendly dunk over Rudy Gobert, and 6-of-14 shooting, the real concern is that he got eaten alive on the glass. He only pulled down two rebounds in 25 minutes, and that’s not a category the Porzingis can afford to lose that badly, no matter how good the opposing center is.
Still, the key takeaway for now: Porzingis has played 25 minutes or more in three straight games, which is a huge positive for a guy who just missed 10 games in a row.
DONUT 4: Blockbuster Trade!
The shelf-life of Isaiah Roby’s Mavericks career was just over five months, but that’s nothing compared to the tenure of the player he was traded for. The Mavericks sent Roby and a second-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder in exchange for Justin Patton and cash. Patton was waived less than 24 hours later. ... and has now been grabbed by Dallas' G-League team, the Texas Legends.
DONUT 5: The Big-Man Bandaid
Patton was always going to be waived, as the Mavericks had to make way for their newest big-man acquisition: Willie Cauley-Stein. The Mavericks sent the well-traveled 2020 Utah Jazz second-round pick (which was quickly losing value during Utah’s recent stretch of 14 wins in 15 games) to the Golden State Warriors in exchange for the 26-year-old Cauley-Stein.
WCS will likely be a defensive improvement over Powell (when engaged), but time will tell if he can achieve any of the athletic rim-running success that Powell brought to the Mavericks high-powered offense. Either way, his $2 million salary, along with the low cost of the trade (Dallas didn't have to forfeit its valued second-rounder from the Warriors), makes him a worthwhile risk for a Mavericks team that just lost critical depth inside.
DONUT 6: Finally an All-Star
It took an excruciating one-and-a-half seasons, but Dallas Mavericks point guard Luka Dončić is finally an NBA All-Star. Not just an All-Star, but a starter for the Western Conference. (See "Slow but Fast Luka'' here.)
Luka is only the third Maverick in team history to be named as a starter (the other two are Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd). He’s also the youngest All-Star starter in 15 years. Probably not too hard to guess that his hero, LeBron James, is the player last tabbed for the honor.
A small part of me might wish for Luka to get a little more rest during All-Star Weekend, especially as he struggles with his jumper and his free throws, but that’s nothing compared to the part of me that’s thrilled to see what he can do in a game with no defense - not counting their recent games against the Warriors and Kings.
Ah, how we basked in that good news ...
DONUT 7: Bad Luck and Bad Timing
The Mavericks are 6-4 over their last 10 games. Not ideal, but not terrible.
They lost three of those games by one, three, and five points. ... each of them putting another notch on the belt that keeps spanking them in clutch games. Frustrating, but competitive. But frustrating.
However, one other thing to remember is that these losses haven’t been to scrub teams like the Knicks. These mostly-competitive losses have come to the top four teams in the Western Conference. The Lakers, Jazz, Clippers, and Nuggets.
Yes, at some point, if the Mavericks want to aspire to anything more than a good regular-season story, they’ll have to beat at least one of those teams in the NBA Playoffs. But it’s not time to panic just yet. Only panic if they go back to spotting teams like the Hornets 20-point leads.
DONUT 8: Aggressive Delon Wright
I know things didn’t work out in crunch-time for the Mavericks, but the way Delon Wright played against the Utah Jazz is the way I’d like to see him play every night. If he does, the Mavericks might even figure out this whole clutch-game issue they’ve been battling for three months.
His stat-line is exactly what you want from an all-around player. 11 points, eight rebounds, four assists, zero turnovers. Yeah, he got blocked at a key moment by Gobert, and that sucks, but a lot of dudes have been blocked by Rudy Gobert. That’s why he’s won a couple of Defensive Player of the Year awards.
What stands out about Wright’s play of late is that it’s slowly-but-surely getting more decisive. He’s playing with more confidence, and while that does occasionally get you blocked, it also leads to a lot of nice plays off the dribble.
DONUT 9: Quotable
“We have a new reality without Dwight. And it’s going to require a togetherness and a real understanding of who we’ve got to be, and that is an attacking team that’s skilled, but defensively we’ve got to do it collectively.’' - Rick Carlisle
DONUT 10: Tonight’s Matchup
The Oklahoma City Thunder are a much better team than we expected them to be coming into the season, and a lot of that has to do with the timeless (and curmudgeonly) tenacity of Chris Paul. He might only be the Point Demi-God these days, but he ate the Mavericks’ defense alive in crunch time last time these two teams played.
His slashing and decision-making helped erase a substantial Mavericks' late-game lead and propelled the Thunder to an unlikely come-from-behind victory.
Dallas still seems like the team with more talent, but their biggest flaw (that inability to close) is the exact flaw that teams like OKC have exploited time-and-again this season.
The Mavericks come into the 7 p.m. tip at 28-17. The Thunder is 28-19, having won five straight, and OKC is nipping at Dallas' sixth-place heels.
DONUT 11: A Moment for Kobe’s Family
We have saved the worst for last.
The news hit my feed via TMZ while I was wrapping up this column, and I thought it was a mistake. Over the next hour, as the facts started to crystalize, the reality hit NBA Twitter hard, but not nearly as hard as it’s hitting the Bryant family. I don’t know what to say, but it felt listless to ignore this new, bitter reality.
Fish and the staff have offered up analysis and insight into the tragic helicopter accident that on Sunday morning also took the life of Kobe's 13-year-old daughter Gianna. To read more about it:
*The news story: Iconic NBA Star Kobe Bryant And Four Others Dead in Fiery Helicopter Accident
*The reaction from the sports world and more
*Mark Cuban Says Mavs Will Retire No. 24
*A Mavs Fan's View: Learning, In the Twilight of Dirk's Career, How to Not 'Hate' Kobe'
All I can do right now is offer my sympathy for a family that lost a husband and father; a daughter and sister. This basketball stuff is nothing compared to that.
DONUT 12: A Final Word
