DALLAS — It all ended in San Francisco Thursday night, but let’s not pretend there is an underlying sadness or failure on the part of the Mavericks this season. Let’s recognize for a moment what they were battling out west.
The Golden State Warriors are going to the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight years. They are going to the Finals for the sixth time in the last six years that Klay Thompson, who had his one and only lights-out shooting game of the series Thursday in scoring 32 points, is healthy. In six Western Conference finals since 2015, the Warriors are 24-8 with two sweeps and two teams (one of them now Dallas) dispatched in five games. They were a team constructed to go to the Finals year after year, and it’s exactly what they have done.
It’s the reason I mostly hate the fact that Kevin Durant stopped by to win a couple of Finals MVP trophies. There’s a great chance they were going to win without him. They won it all in 2015 without him. They won 73 games in 2016 without him. When you draft Stephen Curry seventh (one pick after Jonny Flynn) and Thompson 12th (one pick after Jimmer Fredette) and Draymond Green 35th (oops, right after Dallas landed Bernard James and Jae Crowder) and come back a few years later and grab Jordan Poole 28th (right after Dylan Windler and Mfiondu Kabengele) and then trade D’Angelo Russell and junk to Minnesota for Andrew Wiggins and a pick you turn into Jonathan Kuminga, you’re doing more than a few things right as an organization.
To paraphrase what Ruth told the interim sheriff in the final season of Ozark, “They’re playing chess while you’re playing Candy Land.”
The Mavericks finished 52-30 this season but went 0-3 in the Chase Center during the playoffs. Big deal. So did the Denver Nuggets, who won four fewer games than Dallas this season. So did the Memphis Grizzlies, who won four more games than Dallas. To say it’s a hard place to win come playoff time? Well, for the moment, it has proved impossible. Even if the Warriors drop a game there during the Finals, don’t expect anyone besides Steph and Draymond and Klay and Wiggins to be hoisting more NBA hardware in a couple of weeks.
There are lots of things for the Mavericks to consider, roster moves that are worthy of discussion for this summer and we will save those for tomorrow. It’s just worth recognizing that if you’re going to get into this whole business of being a sports fan, a team that gives you a nice long ride right up until the fringe of Memorial Day weekend, as the Mavericks just did, is worth applauding.
Playoff defeats often come with the exposure of some inefficiency. When the Cowboys go 12-5 after storming through their mundane division (6-0), but get physically overwhelmed by a slightly gimmicky San Francisco offense at home in the playoffs, it raises eyebrows. Or should. And when the Stars give it their all in a seven-game series but register 14 goals against the Calgary Flames, who then surrenders 25 in five games to Edmonton, it’s probably a signal that Dallas lacks a little scoring punch.
While the Mavs certainly have their own needs, none of that hand-wringing is forced by a loss to the Warriors. Now part of that is because the franchise has been so lackluster since the 2011 title that any success comes as a shock. No champion before Dallas ever followed up by going 10 years without a playoff series victory although Chicago won only one series in the first decade after Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen bid farewell.
These particular Mavericks left folks scratching their heads in Utah and Phoenix on the way to the Western Conference finals. In fairness, they were already doing a little scratching in Utah but the Mavericks forced them to kick it up a notch. We thought that the Suns were the most difficult challenge Dallas could face, given Phoenix’s run to the Finals last spring and a 64-win regular season. Instead, they were simply a better version of the same conventional foe that had so much trouble handling the Mavericks’ small-ball, three-point shooting onslaught.
The Warriors, with center Kevon Looney efficiently guarding both Doncic and Jalen Brunson when forced into those matchups and with Green essentially a smaller, more athletic version of a center, weren’t so easily rendered out of sorts. And even with that, the Warriors resorted to more and more zone defense as the series went along, and Dallas still tossed in 84 3-pointers which is the most ever in a five-game playoff by a substantial margin. That doesn’t get you a prize, but it offers some food for thought on where the game is going and how the Mavericks are at the forefront of that movement.
Yes, it’s a team that needs more size and stability and maybe a few other things for next season, but let’s not shove 2021-22 deep into the memory banks too quickly. Dallas was eliminated by a team that is the dominant professional franchise of this era in terms of getting to championship series and collecting trophies. Even with the depth the Warriors displayed, especially in the fourth quarter of Game 4 when Steve Kerr’s bench tried to produce a sweep on its own, their greatness won’t be sustained forever.
The fact that this is not yet the Mavericks’ time is no shame. The challenge now is to make sure it gets here.
