Stop overthinking it, the Mavericks are elite

When a team is one win away from the NBA Finals, especially when the series is 3-0 in said team’s favor, a silly thing to ask is how good is this team that is on the verge to go to the NBA finals?

Yet apparently we are here with the Dallas Mavericks. A Mavericks team that has lost four games total this postseason to the seventh, third and second best teams in the NBA according to Cleaning the Glass net rating.

Full disclosure: none of this really matters. Most of the debate over the Mavericks’ worth as a Finals team takes place online, through Twitter debates and podcast noise. It’s not a dominant narrative, and most Mavericks players themselves probably don’t care what some of us bloggers write. But it bothers me, so here’s what seems like an increasingly bold and courageous take:

The Mavericks are a elite team.

Shocking, I know. Despite what the Mavericks have done since February 5, when Kyrie Irving returned from a prolonged injury absence, the Mavericks, in the eyes of most neutral observers, are a plucky upstart just landing in the final by chance and by shot variance. Never mind these things that actually happened in front of God and everyone:

• From February 5 to the end of the season, the Mavericks finished 24-9. That’s 33 games, or 40 percent of the season. That’s a large enough sample size to think “yeah, that seems real.” The dominant argument for this idea is that “the post-All Star break doesn’t matter”, insinuating that the NBA slump of late February and March undoes most of what teams do, because the idea is that most good teams are just waiting for the playoffs. For starters, most bad teams wait until vacation starts, and everyone is tired and injured enough that games lose their competitive edge. My answer is historically safe, but since the implementation of play-in in 2020, I feel like there has been a big increase in competitiveness towards the end of the season across the board. Do you think the Kings weren’t trying to win as many games as they could when the Mavericks beat them by 40 in late March and both teams were trying to get into sixth place? Did the Lakers take it easy or the Warriors? Did the Suns make it until the end or did they fight with New Orleans to try to avoid the play-in? Combine that with the 65-game rule, which meant the best of the best had to play more to qualify for major awards like MVP and All-NBA, and I think there was more competitive basketball throughout of the season compared to previous seasons before the match. -In. I think brushing aside what the Mavericks did when Irving returned from injury and after trades due to late season noise is pretty silly. It’s not like it was a two-week hot flash — it was 33 games and Dallas was supportive pretty much the whole way. The Mavericks only lost a few games toward the end of the season due to an injury to Luka Doncic and rested once they locked down the fifth seed.
• The talent upgrades at the deadline were real. PJ Washington was a 12th overall pick out of Kentucky, and averaged 15 points per game in his last full season with the Hornets and had decent defensive blocking/steal metrics. Daniel Gafford’s rim protection numbers have been pretty good for a few years now. Derrick Jones Jr. is probably their only truly “lucky” addition, but every contender usually has a guy like that to work with because it’s really hard to win in this league, like Bruce Brown exploding in Denver after solid seasons but unspectacular. in Brooklyn. You can’t tell me this roster is on par with any of Doncic’s previous teams, even the 2022 Western Conference Finals team. That team played second-rounders and undrafted free agents at key locations, and they were great. Now, Dallas has first-round talent and lottery picks filling most spots in the starting lineup and rotation.
• Drafting Derek Lively and him being this good changes a lot of things, and no one could have expected him to be this good this quickly. I said it in my season predictions. But it became clear just as quickly that they had struck gold and he only got better as the season went on. Lively’s impact on this team was felt from opening night, so it’s no surprise that he continued to improve as the season progressed.
• The Mavericks just passed by the seventh and second-best team in net rating to advance to the conference finals, and are one game away from defeating the team with the third-best net rating. The Clippers series is just worth bringing up – no Kawhi Leonard is great, but Doncic was also injured, and did anyone ever think a Mavericks team could win a playoff series with the number of Doncic’s shooting barely hovering above 40 percent from the field and 30 percent from three? This only happens because of the Mavericks defense, which was solid during the regular season. The Thunder’s point of shot variance is so stupid. According to NBA.com tracking data, the Thunder shot 40.7 percent on three “wide open” attempts, with wide open defined as the closest defender six feet away. Dallas only made three other threes total in the series against Oklahoma City. In the playoff total, the Mavericks’ opponents are shooting 36 percent from three. That’s not exactly a lucky number, so what is the difference really? The only type of team that gave Dallas problems after Irving’s return on February 5 was five teams out that spaced the three-point line with their center. Watch these Pacers/Celtics games right after the deadline. The Thunder *should* I’ve been giving this defense some knocks, but it’s not, although I think it’s clear that the Thunder have been the toughest team in their run thus far. Despite this, Dallas still won in six games without a home court advantage and the Thunder were completely healthy and the Mavericks were missing Maxi Kleber, who was good in the second half of the season and in the Clippers series. Thunder was the one seed, Wolves the three seeds. They were two and three in net rankings throughout the season. The fact that the Mavericks are going through them both with potentially only two losses (potentially more, pending the end of the Wolves’ streak) can’t be explained by lucky matchups or random shooting.

This Mavericks team is legit and their defense is not smoke and mirrors. You take away the rim and the paint, and teams will struggle to score, even though the three-point shot is so important.

It certainly helps that the rule changes with fewer fouls called in favor of their playstyle, but these changes apply to everyone. From February 5 until the end of the season, the Mavericks had the sixth-best offense and the sixth-best defense, as well as a net rating that for the season would have ranked them fourth in the league. Would we even be having this discussion if the Mavericks started the season with the roster they had after the deadline? I doubt.

What more do you want from a team than to beat two of the top three teams in net rating and do it pretty convincingly before the consensus says “Well, damn, this team could itself be an elite. » It’s not the Mavericks’ fault that they didn’t have a chance against the Nuggets, just like it wasn’t the 2011 championship team’s fault that they didn’t have a chance against the Spurs, who were upset in the first round by the Grizzlies. The Nuggets didn’t exactly have a killer playoff run last year, they played teams ranked 12th (Suns), 16th (Wolves), and 17th (Lakers) by net rating according to Cleaning the Glass and I been on the record repeatedly praised this team and thought they were a heavyweight. because they were! The idea of ​​this Dallas team being a flash in the pan like Miami’s run last year is very strange. Miami got hot from three in a way they never were in the regular season. Dallas wins with an elite defense that was very present in the last 33 games of the regular season. This always seemed durable to me, because in my mind, removing the rim means more than removing all three. Shots at the rim are the best shots in basketball. It’s no surprise that each Mavericks opponent has struggled in different ways offensively against them, because cutting the paint off a basketball team is like cutting off its oxygen. From February 5 through the end of the season, opponents shot 61.3 percent against the Mavericks, the third-best mark in the league during that span. In the playoffs, opponents are shooting 56.4 percent against the Mavericks, the best among all playoff teams.

The Mavericks are one win away from the NBA Finals and, unless something historic happens, they should clinch their spot in the coming days, or even Tuesday after Game 4. If you watched during the major part of the last three months, that would be it wouldn’t be so shocking. This is what elite teams do.