Dallas Mavericks Again Turn to the Three-Guard Lineup

One could make a laundry list of reasons detailing why Rick Carlisle is a brilliant basketball coach, but chief among them is his flexibility.

Carlisle's system and philosophy are malleable based on specific assets and a maximization of possibility; he doesn't spend time pining over resources he doesn't have, and instead tinkers with his roster until every piece fits just so.

Last season, we saw Carlisle play around with all kinds of strategic possibilities, including a niche approach that paid off during every stage of the 2011 NBA playoffs: the three-guard lineup.

By using the likes of Jason Kidd, Jason Terry and J.J. Barea on the court at the same time, Carlisle's Mavericks were able to apply pressure to opposing defenses from several different directions, and move the ball crisply around the perimeter in pursuit of the open shot. Dallas was just scrappy enough on the defensive end to make the strategy work, and offensively it allowed the Mavs to create exploitable mismatches on a whim.

With that experience in tow, Carlisle has again begun to dabble with three-guard sets—albeit for a very different reason.

When the current campaign began, the Mavericks appeared stacked; they had acquired Rudy Fernandez on draft night, signed Delonte West for the veteran minimum, picked up Vince Carter on a bargain salary, and acquired Lamar Odom without surrendering any considerable assets.

Given the championship-worthy performances of Kidd, Terry and Shawn Marion, while accounting for some growth from Rodrigue Beaubois and Corey Brewer, the Mavs appeared poised to ride out the season on the strength of their depth alone.

Yet over the course of the year, some of that depth has withered away.

Fernandez and Brewer were traded to the Nuggets as a money-saving maneuver, and more damningly, Odom failed to show up in any particularly useful form. The Mavs weren't completely barren on the bench, but the embarrassment of riches on their preseason roster quickly—if I may mix my metaphors—dried up.

Carlisle spent the better part of the season trying to work with, motivate, and best utilize Odom, but to no avail. That effort—and Odom's time in Dallas—has come and gone.

Now Carlisle's challenge isn't to get the most out of a player who clearly had no interest in playing basketball this season, but to address the hole burned in the depth chart by said player's aversion. Odom was supposed to fill a considerable role for the Mavs and open up entirely new avenues for attack.

In a sense, he was supposed to be the third guard—a shooter, a passer and a ball-handler (albeit one who stood 6'10" and could post up just as easily as spot-up).

It simply never came to be, and although Carlisle and the Mavs had tried their damnedest to slowly nudge Odom along, they're now fully committed to the idea of replacing his hypothetical impact through other means.

Thus far, that's translated to Carlisle leaning on those familiar three-guards sets even more often than could otherwise be expected. According to lineup data provided by NBA.com, Dallas has used a three-guard lineup in 59 percent of their on-court minutes since Odom was effectively exiled.

Much of that has to do with Shawn Marion's shift into more playing time at power forward, but perhaps the change is more indicative of Carlisle's efforts to create some stability in a fragile Maverick offense than anything else.

Throughout most of the season, the Mavs have banked on the idea of Odom eventually coming around; he was the late-season "acquisition" that would jump-start their scoring, and once he started playing like his old self, he could offer Dallas all kinds of interesting play and lineup possibilities.

Yet when Odom's revival stalled, so too did any hope of him pulling the Mavs' offense out of the roadside ditch where it currently resides.

Without even the slimmest chance that Odom could save Dallas' 22nd-ranked offense with his versatile production and utility, Carlisle has had to face his team's limitations more directly.

He's recently given Vince Carter more minutes as a way to space the floor, despite the defensive trade-off of sitting Marion more than usual.

He's put as many ball-handlers and shot creators on the court as he possibly can, and further leveraged his defense by replacing Brendan Haywood with more useful scorers like Brandan Wright or Ian Mahinmi whenever possible.

He's feeling out the limits of his team's strengths and struggles, with the three-guard lineup as the chief mechanism of his experimentation.

Carlisle will tweak and fiddle, but there's not much of a compelling, empirical reason for optimism in Dallas. The Mavericks just haven't shown the offensive aptitude this season to warrant serious consideration as a potential dark horse candidate.

They'll undoubtedly make some noise in their own way as Dirk Nowitzki mercilessly tags opponents with fadeaway jumpers and the overall structure of the offense creates what shots it can, but their obstacles are seemingly too many and their hurdles too tall.

Those three-guard lineup constructions may hearken back to brighter days, but they simply don't hold the voltage to resuscitate a fading offense.