It was all so absurd, beginning with the very first night of the season. It feels like eons ago that the Mavericks blew a 22-point lead in Phoenix, a dismal epilogue to their epic seven-game playoff triumph over the Suns back in June. No one thought much of it at the time. This was the first in a multi-hundred-day slog, a pebble-sized ripple in a sea of basketball.
Then, 10 days later, the Mavericks led Oklahoma City by 16 points with 3:57 remaining in the fourth quarter, the sort of edge that NBA teams had ridden to a 9,975-1 record over the last quarter-century. Dallas made that 9,972-2.
Four months after that, against the Lakers, Dallas became the first team to lose this season during a game in which it held a 27-point advantage. The league had previously been 138-0 in such situations.
In March, with their playoff hopes slipping out of reach, the Mavs entered a home tilt against the lowly Hornets as 16-point favorites. They exited on the bad end of what was the biggest upset of the NBA season at the time.
That was two games after their usually imperious offense required 11 minutes and 55 seconds to crack double-digit points in the fourth quarter against Memphis. It was four before their perpetually sieve-like defense allowed Miami’s Jimmy Butler to become the third player to notch 35 points, 10 assists, and no turnovers on 75 percent shooting in a game since turnovers were tracked in 1977-78. No, Dallas didn’t win those, either.
Individually, these moments tell us nothing. They are anomalies, outliers, scattered dots with no line to connect them. Taken en masse, they say everything. The Mavericks lost in incomprehensible ways because they were liable to lose in any way, at any time, to anyone. That’s what bad teams do.
There’s no running from it now, is there? The 2022-23 Mavericks were a bad basketball team. Their best player was one of the five or so best in the game, his new running mate was somewhere around the top 20, and yet they disappointed in a way unrivaled by another Dallas sports team this century. Only the 2021-22 Dallas Stars plummeted from a higher peak to miss the playoffs; they, at least, could jab a finger at injuries and bizarro scheduling at the height of the pandemic.
The Mavericks have no such excuse. They lost when they needed to win, and they very nearly won when they needed to lose. They were thin, and they were small, and they hemorrhaged points like a ruptured tanker spilling oil, which tracks given that overextended, undersized rosters don’t exactly scream defensive solidity. When the threes fell, they could beat almost anyone. When they didn’t, they got beat in all the ways you just read about and then some. Never has a team so prolific at scoring the ball been such a chore to watch.
Which made it fair to wonder, as a reporter did during a rare media availability with Mark Cuban last week, whether the Mavericks owner considered this the most disappointing season he’s experienced since purchasing the team 23 years ago. “Not even close,” he insisted, before citing the 2016-2017 team—he apparently harbored a lot of faith in late-career Andrew Bogut—and the 2008-2009 team as much greater frustrations. Whether you take his answer at face value, there’s no question that we’ve just experienced the greatest letdown since Luka Doncic’s arrival five years ago, and not only because the Doncic era up to this point was defined by nearly unabated forward progress. It is one thing for a team to underperform every reasonable expectation. It is much more damning to conduct a season-long stress test of the franchise player’s emotional mettle, even if Doncic said he remains happy in Dallas during an exit interview Sunday.
It is far too soon to tell if this is rock bottom for this era of the Mavericks. But it needs to be. Because this team cannot afford to continue its ongoing depletion of assets by watching Kyrie Irving depart in free agency for nothing in return. It isn’t built to absorb the 20.2 percent chance of its draft pick falling outside the top 10 during next month’s draft lottery, thereby conveying the pick to New York to complete the Kristaps Porzingis trade. (If your first reaction is to wave off that small chance of something going wrong, you aren’t acquainted with the worst lottery luck in the NBA.) Nor can such a top-heavy group keep enduring the drought at the lower-middle of the roster, where the team was once so adept at retrofitting other teams’ castoffs into valuable rotation cogs. A roster this piecemeal can’t withstand a coaching staff that appeared to lose its capacity to scheme its way out of trouble.
After what we’ve seen this season, there is no dismissing the possibility of each or all of those things prolonging the hopelessness that set in over the last two months. The longer that stretches, the closer the hands on Dallas’ doomsday clock tick toward midnight, and the franchise’s extinction-level event: Doncic demanding a trade or, worse, departing in free agency the way Jalen Brunson did before him.
So this must be the nadir. After years of losing on the margins, the Mavericks must fight a smarter fight, a more efficient one. Victory will require big moves, sure, but smaller, shrewder ones, too. There can be no more inefficiency on the trade market, no more failed moonshots in free agency, no more blaming arcane rule changes for being a step slow strategically. They must build a team that goes beyond merely returning to the Western Conference Finals and instead ascends to the ranks of the league’s true contenders. It’s the only acceptable outcome when this team employs a generational talent, a superstar who, though flawed, delivers Hall of Fame-caliber production even in an off year.
Because if they don’t build, this can—and probably will—come tumbling down. And then the only thing more absurd than what we just watched will be how the Mavericks let Luka Doncic’s best years go to waste.
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