The Dallas Mavericks, like every other NBA team, have 15 players on their team. Unlike most other teams, though, the Mavs boast an enviable level of continuity. During their surprising run to last year’s Finals, the Mavs scored 2,331 points and the players responsible for more than 80 percent of those points are still on the roster. Even if the Mavs have certainly upgraded their roster by trimming some of the fat and making some clever free agent additions, this is by and large, the same tough, shrewd outfit that cruised through the Western Conference playoffs. Still, nobody is here to read about Klay Thompson or Kyrie Irving, let alone Naji Marshall.
As with the last half decade, the Mavs go as Luka Doncic goes. Beyond simply being one of the league’s best players, Doncic is its most controlling and the most in control. Whereas the likes of Nikola Jokic or Joel Embiid still need someone to toss them entry passes, Doncic doesn’t require a support staff. Every possession runs through him and every shot is filtered through his perspective. Heliocentrism is so 2021; this is hedonism.
Last season, Doncic pushed his game to new, gluttonous heights, setting career-highs as both a scorer (league-leading 33.9 points per game) and a passer (9.8 assists per game). He played more minutes, took more shots and won more playoff games than ever before. And even as he led the league in usage rate for the third time in four years, his 61.5 percent True Shooting was the most efficient of his career.
Interestingly, Doncic put together the best year of his career not by fixing his weaknesses, but by doubling down on his strengths. Namely, he doubled down on his physical strength. To be sure, Doncic has never been particularly waifish, but he still moved like a guard earlier in his career. He ran and jumped; he even dunked! But that was four years and 50ish pounds ago. At some point over the intervening years, Doncic realized that it was silly to waste energy trying to go around defenders when he could simply go through them.
If pretty much every other ball-handler in the league tries to create separation, Doncic is alone in his quest to collapse it. By subtly tinkering with angles and positioning, Doncic pins his opponent against his body. In doing so, he effectively erases them from the play—can’t be a pest since they can’t even be a presence. When Doncic scoots back for a step-back jumper, he knows that his defender can’t reach his release point. When he lofts a floater, he barely registers that anyone is there.
During Dallas’ five-game romp in the Western Conference Finals, Doncic made mincemeat out of a historically great Minnesota Timberwolves defense by disrupting their most basic assumptions. At a certain level, defense is mostly an exercise in misdirection. The offense will always be able to create a scoring chance, but the best defenses snuff it out by making teams hesitant to seize it.
So, by refusing to relinquish any advantage, Doncic places defenders in a constant state of tension. Even when piloting through the densest areas of the court, he keeps his dribble and keeps his head, ensuring that he doesn’t foreclose on potential opportunities. He never prematurely shuts passing lanes by taking reckless angles to the rim; he doesn’t jump without a purpose. Inevitably, he works his way into a defense’s points of failure and then he waits, applying pressure until the defense fractures around him.
Still, Doncic’s girth comes with a price. While his heft allows him to tap into a level of offensive brilliance that no one else can reach, it makes it harder for him to sustain that level through June. In each of his last two playoff runs, Doncic has suffered from a long list of maladies as his body strained (literally) under his weight. Against the Celtics in the Finals, he seemed exhausted, only able to maintain his customary brilliance for a few minutes at a time. Across the Mavs’ four Finals losses, Doncic cumulatively racked up 38 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists in the first quarter, compared to 18, seven and six in the fourth. Similarly, his shooting percentage plummeted from 52 percent in the first quarter to 33 percent in the fourth.
Accordingly, Doncic and the Mavs have to reconcile a series of contradictions. The Mavs can only contend if Doncic is dominant; Doncic is at his most dominant when he bulks up; a bulked-up version of Doncic probably can’t maintain peak performance throughout a full playoff run. As such, the shape of Dallas’ season will be determined by the shape of their franchise player. Getting the most out of Doncic raises their ceiling, but lowers their likelihood of reaching it. Is that tradeoff worth the weight?
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