While the Dallas Mavericks have opened up the season with a pretty solid 9-5 start, they still have some very noticeable flaws and don’t match up the best with many Western Conference playoff-caliber teams.
Whether Dallas will seek to address some of their more fatal flaws before the trade deadline this year is completely up in the air, but it’s obvious through 14 games that this Mavericks team isn’t a perfect roster.
The Mavericks have fallen victim to plenty of rebounding and defensive woes early on, and they haven’t faced the hardest strength of schedule compared to other teams either.
5 Western Conference teams the Mavericks aren’t ready for come playoff time
It will be intriguing to see if Dallas works to mend these issues via trade or a potential G-League call-up, or if they will try to just let the issues work themselves out over time with increased continuity.
We don’t know how Dallas will look come playoff time, but as of right now, they are still behind the curve compared to a few of their most formidable foes in the Western Conference this season. That being said, here are five Western Conference teams the Mavericks aren’t ready for come playoff time.
5. Los Angeles Lakers
The vast majority of the Los Angeles Lakers fanbase has notoriously been given the label of “bandwagoners,” and the fanbase has always had a tense relationship with the Mavericks fanbase given how many tough battles the Lakers and the Mavericks have had throughout their franchise histories.
That being said, Lakers fans may not be wrong about their team this year. The Lakers are currently 9-6, and despite a few growing pains early on, the roster seems like it has synchronized well together in this recent stretch.
4. Sacramento Kings
The Dallas Mavericks saw just how much production on offense the Domantas Sabonis-De’Aaron Fox tandem can generate when they combined for 62 points in the Kings’ 129-113 victory over Dallas a few nights ago. Sabonis is an extremely dynamic offensive big whom the Kings routinely run DHOs and trail action with because of Sabonis’ ability to play-make from different areas inside the arc.
This makes things especially problematic for Dallas when they are facing Sacramento because Sabonis typically draws mismatches through these actions and stretches Dallas’ bigs out to the perimeter. Despite how good Dereck Lively II is, actions like that put him in an extremely precarious position given that he is getting switched onto one of De’Aaron Fox or Malik Monk in those scenarios.
3. Oklahoma City Thunder
Through extremely good drafting and roster management, Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti has revolutionized the Thunder franchise around star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Thunder were a fringe play-in team just a season ago, but with the number two overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft in Chet Holmgren returning from injury this season, the young Thunder have ascended to another level to start the 2023-24 NBA season with the addition of a rim protector at the back end as they now sit at 10-4.
The Thunder play extremely fast as they rank seventh in pace in the entire NBA, and all of their young players have seemingly taken a step in their development every year since they were drafted. The Thunder have a good amount of shooting off the bench too, and their only real deficiency in their starting lineup is their lack of positional size at the three and four spots as well as Holmgren’s inability to anchor down against stockier big men.
2. Denver Nuggets
The incumbent NBA champion Denver Nuggets are defending their title valiantly, as they’ve surged to 10-4 at the start of the year. The Mavericks matched up against the Nuggets in their first game of the NBA’s new in-season tournament on November 3.
Dallas lost 125-114 in that game and was picked apart by the passing ability of Nikola Jokic. Jokic was too big for Dereck Lively II down low and was able to single-handedly dominate the glass against Dallas. Dallas will have to do a better job at applying pressure from multiple defenders to derail some of Jokic’s passes, but personnel-wise the Mavericks don’t stack up the best because of their lack of positional size on the wing.
1. Minnesota Timberwolves
When the Dallas Mavericks dropped back-to-back games in the preseason in Abu-Dhabi versus the Minnesota Timberwolves, many Mavericks fans were panicking because no one really had a grasp of how good Minnesota would be to start the season. Now of course the Timberwolves aren’t a proven commodity as a perennial playoff team, but after 13 games they are sitting atop the Western Conference at 10-3.
It was just announced yesterday that Timberwolves starting power forward Jaden McDaniels will miss some time with a grade-one ankle sprain, but whenever he gets back, an argument can be made that the Timberwolves currently have the best starting five in the NBA.
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