In a perfect world — and by that I mean perfect for disgruntled Mavs fans, happy Mavs fans, you, me, Nico, the whole works — Dallas continues to play sound, aggressive basketball with or without any centers for the next two months and finishes as the No. 5 seed in the Western Conference.
And the Lakers finish at No. 4. And away we go for a best-of-seven Luka Does Dallas first-round series.
Perfect.
While it’s fun to seek perfection — I suppose in some way I pursue it every time I sit down to write a column (currently 0-for-4,000) — I don’t anticipate it on the basketball floor. The Mavericks and the Lakers were the two most talked about franchises for the last two weeks, ever since what we in Dallas now refer to as “the Max Christie trade” took place. But these are flawed teams and I think both will be fortunate to do better than fight their way through the play-in games as 7-10 seeds when the time comes.
Let’s start with Luka and the Lakers. He has played two games there, done next to nothing by his standards (averaging 15 points, 4.5 rebounds, 4 assists) and the team has split with Utah. Before he arrived, LA was a hot team and that was true while Anthony Davis was playing and even more true when he got hurt. In fact, the Lakers are 6-1 since Davis last played. The Mavs are 3-1 in their last four games with Davis sidelined.
Maybe the key to everything is Davis not playing for your team?
But without him, over time, the Lakers have a bigger hole in the middle than the Mavericks. They traded for Charlotte center Mark Williams, then rescinded the trade following a physical. They may regret that. He’s averaging 16 points and 10 rebounds per game this season. While the NBA has become, in many ways, a league without positions — something the Lakers hope to exploit with the LeBron-Luka scoring machine — the absence of an inside threat or a rim protector of any kind will be a challenge against the good, young teams in the West that all have serious size on their side.
So while LA is currently 5th in the West, I can see them sliding to 7th or 8th over the next two months.
Dallas can afford no such slides. Despite a recent surge, the Mavs are in the 8th spot and Golden State and Sacramento are each 1 1/2 games behind. You want to get into the top six, and you definitely don’t want to fall to the 9-10 spots where a team has to win two play-in games without a loss just to make the playoffs.
The good news, and possibly the weird news, is that Jason Kidd might be doing his best coaching job in four seasons here, especially of late. A team without Luka or AD beat the Celtics in Boston, beat Golden State and Miami heading into the All-Star break and lost only to the Kings in overtime. The team is hustling, scrambling, playing faster at the offensive end despite the fact they don’t have any of their centers that are deemed necessary to rebound and ignite the fast break. A lot of it is Kyrie Irving, but much of it comes from Christie and others who appear to be playing to their absolute ceilings night after night.
I know some of you think Kidd is only a drag on the team, that he’s never responsible for wins but solely to blame for defeats when he doesn’t call timeouts at the proper time or calls lousy sets at the end of close games. I think he and the staff have to get substantial credit for keeping this team focused while everything swirling around the team is an understandable negative reaction to the Luka trade.
The problems for the Mavs are twofold. There’s not really a clear timeline on when any of the centers — Davis, Daniel Gafford, Dereck Lively II — can be counted on to be not just active but playing 25-30 effective minutes. It’s dangerous to assume that will happen for any of them this season, especially for Lively who was a force in the playoffs last year but had a nice run of games leading into it. He played 55 games as a rookie out of Duke and won’t get close to that number this season.
Beyond that, travel will challenge this club. While the home schedule is soft enough (half of the 12 remaining games are against opponents outside the top 10 in either conference right now), the same isn’t true on the road. Of the 14 games, nine are against clubs in the top seven of their conference and another is against a top-10 opponent. This team has to take care of business against the tanking Pelicans of New Orleans on Friday, then do some serious work.
It still could happen. Behind Oklahoma City, Memphis and Denver, no spots are really secure since Houston went into a massive fade before the break. Maybe that’s how the Lakers get to No. 4, Dallas climbs to No. 5 and the world gets an early evaluation of how this monster trade plays out.