The Dallas Mavericks’ best player is a 37-year-old who cannot move laterally. Their second best player hasn’t been good in three years, and was paid by his former team to go away.
Their third best player is only nine months removed from the most devastating injury an NBA player can have. Their fourth best player is Zaza Pachulia.
If the NBA season ended today, the Dallas Mavericks would have home court advantage in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs.
Talent wins in the NBA, until it doesn’t.
Historically, the balance between talent and system has tilted heavily towards talent, but it’s never been a knockout blow. The 2004 Detroit Pistons weren’t as talented as the Lakers they destroyed in the Finals that year. Perhaps more fittingly, the 2011 Mavericks, who at times started DeShawn Stevenson and a 38-year-old Jason Kidd on the wing opposite LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, carved up the heavily favoured Heat.
The present day Dallas Mavericks aren’t about to join those teams in history. Those Dallas and Detroit teams had real, meaningful talent that these Mavericks do not. 2011 Dirk Nowitzki was one of the three best players on the planet and the ’04 Pistons started four multiple All-Stars, each in their prime.
But in their own way the 2015-16 Mavs are making an even stronger argument in favour of the merits of system over talent than either of those teams, precisely because they are so devoid of the latter.
The Mavs have made an art of not beating themselves. They are consummate professionals; they have smart gameplans which they execute to a tee, they play selflessly and within themselves, and they never melt down.
In an 82-game season where Tuesday in Milwaukee has a habit of blending into Thursday in Minnesota, the Mavericks show up every night. As Keanu Reeves once memorably said, one of the most important things in life is showing up.
Dallas do have talent, but it aspires to be modest, and history suggests that it is their system allowing the talent to prosper and not the other way around.
Last season Deron Williams looked like he was almost finished as a basketball player. He shot 38.7 per cent from the floor and couldn’t finish anything at the rim. His body had abandoned him after years of nagging injuries, and his mind was beaten down as a result, unable to win an uphill battle.
His move to Dallas had a hint of a William Faulkner novel about it – as though he was going out to Southern pasture to die, returning home to make his basketball death more comfortable.
Williams has been reinvigorated by home. After shooting a miserable 45.7 per cent at the rim in Brooklyn last season, he’s shooting 63.6 per cent there this season. He’s not back to his Utah glory, but he’s re-emerged as an above average starting point guard, and for the first time in years he’s playing as though he’s alive.
Wesley Matthews was another player who looked as though he was coming to Texas to make retirement more comfortable. While Williams was comforted by home, Matthews was comforted by a $70-million contract. Virtually nobody has come back the same from the Achilles injury Matthews suffered last March, with Kobe Bryant, Chauncey Billups and Elton Brand recent victims who were never the same.
But Matthews sustained the injury at a much younger age than those guys, and his relative youth combined with a heralded work ethic inspired hope that he could become an outlier.
Matthews isn’t back to pre-injury levels yet, but the fact that he’s looked as good as he has is one of the best stories in the NBA. He’s not quite back to swaggering up and down the court and abusing smaller guards in the post, but he’s locking down on defence and providing the Mavericks with spacing that Monta Ellis couldn’t provide.
Even if he’s only shooting 33.8 per cent from deep, teams still respect his shot, fearful that he could explode as he did against Washington this week for 36 points and 10 made threes. With Matthews on the floor, only Golden State’s offence has been better than Dallas’. When he’s off the court, only the Sixers have a less efficient offence than the Mavs.
Zaza Pachulia has been a revelation, averaging a double-double, Dwight Powell has been a bench spark, and somehow Dallas have been able to extract competent minutes from the ghosts of Raymond Felton and JJ Barea. That’s what Dallas do though – it’s what they’ve been doing ever since Rick Carlisle arrived in 2008.
The Mavericks put their players in positions to succeed, emphasising what they can do and accepting what they can’t. Williams has been empowered, Pachulia has been given a second (or third, or fourth) life, and Matthews has been allowed to find his way. Chandler Parsons has been managed with a view to the future, with the Mavericks not falling victim to the myopia that befell Oklahoma City last year with Kevin Durant, or the Blazers with Brandon Roy years ago in the playoffs.
And then there’s Dirk. Carlisle deserves immense credit for the infrastructure he’s created, but none of this works without Nowitzki. A structure needs a tent-pole, and Dirk has been a 7-foot foundational pole for the Mavericks for 20 years. German engineering, I suppose.
Last year looked like the end of the road for the greatest big man shooter of all-time. He had his worst offensive season since his rookie year, and he had become a defensive albatross, far too slow to guard opposing fours, and not nearly physically imposing enough to protect the rim at the five.
Like so many around him, Dirk has found new life. Through 22 games he’s having the most efficient shooting season of his entire career, making above 50 per cent of his shots from the floor and 43.8 per cent from three. He’s even rebounding at his best rate since 2010. He’s still a defensive liability (with Dirk off the floor the Mavs have the league’s third-best defence, with him on it they tumble to 18th) but he more than makes up the difference on offence, with only the Warriors and Thunder being more efficient than the Mavs on that end with Nowitzki on the court.
There are some smoke and mirrors to the Mavericks’ 13-9 record (which, fittingly has been built on gameplans of smoke and mirrors). Dallas has had the easiest schedule in the league to date, having already played five games against the Lakers, 76ers and the early season wounded Pelicans. But they’ve had some impressive victories regardless, having knocked off the Clippers and Jazz in Dallas, and beaten Boston, Washington, Houston and Phoenix on the road. They also played Oklahoma City and San Antonio to the final minute in close road defeats.
There is still plenty of upside in this team that should counteract the downside of a tougher schedule. Matthews should get better as the season goes along, and Parsons has said that his real season will effectively start in January when his minutes limit is lifted.
The Mavericks’ goal before the season should have been to get to 2016 in striking distance of the playoffs, in the hope that the injured Parsons, Matthews and Williams would be fighting fit by then to propel them down the stretch. They’re well ahead of schedule, and being 13-9 with Dirk only needing to play 30 minutes a game is a minor miracle.
The Mavericks aren’t contenders in a meaningful sense. While the West is weaker, they have virtually no shot against a healthy Warriors, Spurs or Thunder. But the fact that they’ve found themselves in the second tier just below these teams is a title victory of other sorts.
The future is still murky, with no self-evident avenue back to the Finals. Nowitzki and Williams are passed their primes, and Parsons can leave after this season. There are no young building blocks on the team and Dallas will almost certainly forfeit its first-round draft pick to Boston (top seven protected).
The hope will be that the proven track records of Carlisle and Mark Cuban and the big market of Dallas will be enough to draw a transformational free agent. But that hope has burned the Mavericks in the past, notably with Dwight Howard and a younger Williams, and memorably with DeAndre Jordan this past summer.
While the future offers few tangible reasons for optimism, the present is the ultimate silver lining. The fact that Dallas has crafted the league’s 12th best defence with their old, slow, unconscionably unathletic personnel, and continue to be meaningfully competitive on a nightly basis, is one of the season’s greatest feats.
The Mavericks are a testament to hard work, selflessness and savvy – proof that the basketball Gods will reward you for things other than God-given talent.
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