The Good, Bad and Ugly from the Dallas Mavericks' Early Season
The season may be young, but so far, so good for the Dallas Mavericks.
The Mavs are 3-1 through the first week of the NBA season, with their only loss being a one-point heartbreaker in San Antonio on opening night.
Other than that, the 2014-15 campaign is going about as well as possible. Dirk Nowitzki is showing no signs of slowing down, Tyson Chandler is fitting right back in and Chandler Parsons looks like he's been a Maverick all along.
That being said, it’s impossible to be perfect. And even though things are going so well, there are fairly large problems in the early goings.
And since it’s so early in the year, we’ll try to keep this relatively simple. Nitpicking has it’s time and place, but since only four games have been played, we’ll just focus on the basics.
The Good: The Offense
Coming into the year the theory was that, though the Mavs had problems defensively, their juggernaut of an offense would carry them to the playoffs.
Well, that’s not just a theory anymore.
The Mavericks lead the NBA in scoring with 111.8 points per game. This is thanks largely to their league-leading shooting percentage of 52.4 percent and their absurd 57.8 assisted field-goal percentage.
There really isn’t an offensive category they aren’t great in. Dallas is a top-10 team in three-point shooting, threes made, points per shot, free-throw shooting, turnovers...
You get the point.
These Mavericks are hyper-efficient. They don’t turn the ball over, they hit shots, they share the ball and, so far, 10 guys are playing 12 minutes or more per game.
Let’s put it this way: Chandler Parsons is off to a good start, averaging 18.8 points per game while shooting 50 percent from the floor.
And he’s actually dragging the team shooting percentage down.
Six players are averaging two or more assists per game, six are shooting 50 percent or better from the floor, five are hitting more than 40 percent from three and seven players have PERs that would have placed them in the top 50 from the 2013-14 season.
At a certain point, it’s just unfair.
Dirk, Parsons and Monta Ellis are the main cogs in the offense. They’re the primary scorers, distributors and offensive initiators. It all essentially runs through them.
But the guys around them are what makes the offense so deadly. Devin Harris is absolutely lighting it up off the bench, J.J. Barea looks just as shifty and crafty as he did back in 2011 and Jameer Nelson is hitting 44.4 percent from three.
Then there are the big guys. Tyson Chandler is shooting a ridiculous 70.4 percent from the floor while averaging 10.5 points. But he’s actually being overshadowed by his backup.
Brandan Wright is shooting 88.9 percent this season.
You can come to your own conclusions on whether that’s sustainable, but what we do know is that this offense looks poised to be the best in the league.
The Bad: The Chemistry
You know what’s scary? For all the statistics that say the Mavs can do no wrong on offense, that they’re savant-esque and that they’ll be unstoppable all year, they aren’t quite firing on all cylinders.
It’s true.
Obviously, the shooting numbers are absurd, and realistically, the players won't be able to maintain that sort of production. The best team in the league in regard to shooting percentage shot just over 50 percent last season (the Miami Heat), and the Mavs will probably hover right around there in 2014-15.
The issue is that, though the team is putting up numbers, it doesn’t look quite right.
Some of it comes on bailouts from Dirk, where the play comes apart and the Big German just hits one of his signature iso-fadeaways.
Some of it happens when there’s a bounce pass to a cut that’s not there. Or the ball gets stuck too long on a possession. Or that one last pass just isn’t quite made. Or there's a bad pass that leads to one of those “my bad” chest taps.
Of course some of these things are just going to happen throughout the course of playing basketball; that’s the nature of the game. But these kinds of little miscues are happening a lot for Dallas, and given all the roster turnover in the offseason, this makes sense.
The team just needs more time to gel, to have the offense start clicking.
And this manifests itself on defense, too. Missed rotations, overhelping and overall unfamiliarity are evident. These are problems that pop up less often when players are familiar with each other and the system.
Now, this is nothing unexpected. When a team incorporates six new players into a rotation, there are bound to be kinks, wrinkles that need to be ironed out.
And when that happens, things will get really interesting. In an interview with The Dallas Morning News' Eddie Sefko, owner Mark Cuban hinted that this offense might be one of the best he's seen and that the only thing holding it back is a matter of the players settling in.
"“We have that potential,” owner Mark Cuban said about whether this is the best offense the Mavericks have ever had. “We’re still too hesitant, and the ball doesn’t move fast enough because everybody’s trying to be unselfish and share the ball, which is good, but it slows things down. We got to get better.”
Asked to expand, Cuban said, “We just got to be crisper. We’ve got to get to reacting. The ball’s got to move without thinking about where it’s going. If the ball moves more quickly, our offense can be even more potent. Right now, everybody’s got to think. And they’re digesting what to do and while we’re doing that, we won’t be nearly as effective as we can be.”
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The Ugly: The Defense
Again, no surprise here. When only one player in the starting five is a plus defender, this end of the floor is bound to be bad.
Tyson Chandler simply can’t make up for everyone’s mistakes.
Dallas ranks 28th in the NBA with a defensive efficiency rating of 109. The team also ranks in the bottom third of the league in opponents’ shooting percentage and points per shot and dead last in defensive rebounding rate.
The only thing the Mavs are decent at is defending the three; they've held opponents to 8.3 makes per game on 35.9 percent shooting, good for eighth and 15th in the NBA, respectively.
So that’s something.
But other than that, it’s really pretty bad. Opponents shoot well and rebound well. That’s a very problematic combination.
And it’s not like these stats lie. The Mavs just don’t have great defensive personnel. Parsons might eventually be decent on that end, but as of right now, he’s decidedly average-to-mediocre. None of the guards are especially stout, and Dirk has never been much of a stopper.
That leaves the defending to Chandler and Wright. And while Chandler is a stud and Wright’s not terribly far behind, neither is good enough to shoulder the entire defensive load.
That being said, the argument could be made that, based on talent, this team should be better on defense than it was last year. Younger legs, better bigs and more bodies should mean a stingier defense.
Last season, Dallas was 22nd in defensive efficiency at 105.9, which is by no means awe-inspiring, but is 3.1 points better than this season.
The Mavs won’t be this bad all year. They won’t finish in the top 10 defensively, but then again, they don’t have to. They just need to be somewhere around average.
But right now, they’ve failed to hold a team to less than 100 points. And the Utah Jazz, Charlotte Hornets and Boston Celtics combined to score 324 points in three games.
That right there is the definition of ugly.
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