One of my biggest concerns coming into this season was about Luka Dončić.
That concern had very little to do with the perennial MVP candidate’s ability, and more to do with the roster around him, one that lost second-leading scorer Jalen Brunson for nothing during the offseason. What would Brunson’s departure mean for Dončić, who already had the NBA’s highest usage rate among guards last season? Will it be too heavy a load to carry at times?
It’s obviously a bit early to answer that question. But in watching the Mavs so far, they’ve provided some interesting counters to that initial thought.
Dončić is still up to his heliocentric ways, and as of Tuesday morning led the league lead in usage, with about 39% of Dallas’s possessions ending with either a Dončić shot or turnover. Yet the Mavs playing with a faster tempo could shorten many of those possessions, making for far less grinding work in the process.
The Mavericks, dead last in pace last season as a result of Dončić’s slow, rock-the-defender-to-sleep tendencies, currently rank 24th. Still below average, and still slow, but still noticeably quicker than a year ago. Some of that seems orchestrated and by design.
Christian Wood, the team’s biggest offseason acquisition and its second-leading scorer, said Dončic told him during the team’s win over the Grizzlies to just run down the floor hard and to possess the dunker spot on the floor, and that Dončić would get him a lob pass during an upcoming possession. Shortly after that, Dončić blocked a shot, pushed the ball in transition and then did precisely that, leading to a Wood dunk on the break.
That sequence—Dallas getting a stop, then immediately pushing the tempo—has yielded great things for the Mavs thus far. They’ve averaged 1.41 points per possession after forcing misses on defense, the highest rate in the league by a mile, according to Inpredictable, an analytical site that breaks down data by possession type.
Perhaps even more promising than the transition opportunities is the Dončić-Wood partnership. The duo has logged only 31 minutes together so far, as Wood has come off the bench to this point. But even in that role, Wood has thrived, averaging 25 points through the first two games, while the Mavs have put up a whopping 147.6 points per 100 possessions in Dončić and Wood’s time together.
So maybe the questions about Dončić’s workload were overblown. If the defense can perform the way it has while getting anywhere near this much out of Wood as a second scorer, the Mavs will be a threat to get back to the Western Conference finals, or perhaps even beyond that.
