What We Saw, What It Felt Like: Mavs-Kings

The playoffs are complicated. Each series is its own story, and each game is its own chapter encompassing a dozen moments and plot points. But the playoffs can also be simple. Each of those moments, those plot points, falls into one of two buckets: the things we observe and the emotions they inspire within us. That’s what we’re here to talk about.

What We Saw

Defense wins games in the SoFi Play-In Tournament!

Scorn aside, playing the level of smothering, layered defense that the Mavericks played last night takes real Locking In, and these Mavericks do that. Even without Kyrie Irving’s wizardry, this is an interesting (and, at times, fun!) team to watch compete. Take the second quarter, when the Mavericks forced 10 turnovers and turned them into 12 points, while two other defensive stops turned into back-to-back made open threes from … Brandon Williams, who recently signed his first multi-year NBA contract. The 25-year-old provided just enough juice and playmaking to set Anthony Davis up a few times, which seems to be a better option than Davis setting up himself at this point.

Elsewhere, Klay Thompson went 5 for 5 (4 for 4 from three) in the second and scored 16 points, because he is Klay Thompson. He was brought in to hit big-time shots in high-stakes games, maybe swing a playoff series or two if things got crazy. Thompson changing a game and effectively ending it in the blink of an eye is expected. That’s what Dallas missed last postseason, thus the value of Thompson to Luka Dončić in the … never mind. I am going insane.

The Kings did provide a glimpse of a current and future Dallas weakness by scoring seven fastbreak points in the first quarter. Davis-anchored defenses have always been prone to giving up easy buckets in transition, and if a team can run on this Frankensteinian bunch of long bodies, it can cause them pain. That will remain a major concern no matter when Irving gets back on the floor next year.

However, if the Mavericks can lure an opponent into a halfcourt game like they did with Sacramento (Zach LaVine and DeMar DeRaozan need mid-range shots like oxygen), they can go into suffocation mode. Dallas held the Kings to an offensive rating of 87.6 in the halfcourt, a number that would’ve been well below the worst mark of any team on the season.

This roster, sans Davis, was constructed to play to Dončić’s strengths, and vice versa. And Dončić at the center of this group was as close to roster-building harmony as Dallas has been in a while, which adds to the forever pain. Wednesday night doesn’t change any of that, but it is a timely reminder that this team still has good players who certainly are tired of hearing about all of this. They showed that—and a glimpse of the future, for whatever it’s worth—in a resounding win. —Jake Kemp

What It Felt Like

Defiance. This group knows plenty about that by now, after two months of refusing to buckle under the weight of their franchise’s bad decisions and their own creaky bodies.

The Mavericks could have disintegrated after Nico Harrison shipped Luka Dončić out of town, and perhaps should have after Irving tore his ACL one month later. They withstood 47 different starting lineups, second-most in the league, and more than 1,200 minutes without a healthy center, which feels like some kind of record. Davis was told to pack it in; he demurred. Jason Kidd stopped trusting what was left of the post-Dončić, post-Irving lead ballhandlers, so he simply gave up on starting one.

None of that sounds like the foundation of a team that waltzes into one of the loudest arenas in basketball and administers a 14-point beatdown in a game that felt nowhere near that close. But to know the 2024-25 Dallas Mavericks is to understand that the players still standing can certainly be beaten, but they will not capitulate. And to watch that Blitzkrieg of a second quarter, in which the Mavs forced more turnovers (10) than they allowed baskets (seven), was to accept that they are far from ready to give up.

That mentality starts with Kidd, who has fully undone his reputation in Milwaukee and Brooklyn as someone wound far too tight to hold a locker room together. But it permeates throughout a roster that has seen some shit, from the returnees on last year’s Finals team to Davis and Thompson, who have five championship rings between them. It has rubbed off on Williams, who has emerged from four years of muck in the G-League to become the ballsy yet composed bench scorer that Jaden Hardy was supposed to be. A group that had every reason to splinter looked cohesive, composed.

That may not get them past Memphis on Friday night, and it definitely won’t carry them beyond a hellaciously good Oklahoma City team. No matter what Harrison said at that goofy media roundtable, the Mavericks are so much further away from a championship than they were at the start of this season. But they’ve lived to see another day. That still counts for something, no matter how bleak these last two months have been. —Mike Piellucci