Dallas Mavericks will be SNEAKY GOOD w/ Anthony Davis, Cooper Flagg & healthy Kyrie Irving

Dallas Mavericks will be SNEAKY GOOD w/ Anthony Davis, Cooper Flagg & healthy Kyrie Irving

The Dallas Mavericks, quick offseason recap. They lost Spencer Denwitty, Kesler Edwards, and Olivia Maxon’s Prosper. They added Cooper Flag, the number one overall pick. D’Angelo Russell. I covered DLo very closely with the Lakers, obviously, as a Lakers fan. He’s James Harden Light. Not a guy that you want to depend on in a playoff rotation, but I do think that he’s an incredibly underrated regular season player. As far as the playoff stuff, it’s the same kind of thing. He makes too many defensive mistakes and he struggles on offense when the physicality and intensity go up a level. On the offensive end of the floor though, the reason why he’s such an underrated regular season player is he just can run NBA offense. He can run pick and roll and he can score and make the reads out of it. He can generate quality shots for your team. With the Lakers, he was always the best guy at getting the ball to Anthony Davis on the roll. with LeBron, teams mostly just switched it, so it kind of uh neutralized that action in many cases. And Austin just isn’t as good of a passer as D’Angelo Russell was. So like I expect him to be a guy to help unlock Anthony Davis offensively. I thought it was a really just savvy move from that front office. And it looks like he’s going to start the season as the starting point guard. So they’re going to need DLO to be good. And again, like as long as that can be addressed at some point during the season, whether that’s Kyrie Irving uh returning at some point or that’s a trade that balances the roster to bring in another ball handler, I am perfectly fine with D’Angelo Russell being my starting point guard in the regular season because I think he’s a good floor raising offensive talent in the NBA regular season. They also added Dennis Smith for more depth in ball handling. This is one of the most talented rosters in the league, just in a very unbalanced kind of way, right? Like, let me just read these names. This is their top nine players. Anthony Davis, Cooper Flag, Klay Thompson, PJ Washington, Derek Lively, Max Christie, who I think is really good. Covered him with the Lakers, too. Daniel Gaffford, D’Angelo Russell, and Naji Marshall. That’s a sick top nine. That’s a lot of really good players. It’s just that three of those dudes are centers and only one of those dudes is actually a professional ball handler. And ideally, he’d be coming off the bench for you. So, that’s what makes this such a funky kind of situation going on in Dallas. In many ways, I think Cooper Flag and Anthony Davis are going to be the key to the offensive end of the floor. Cooper’s going to have to handle the ball a ton because they’re light on ball handling. Dallas straight up asked him to do that in summer league. I was there. I got to see it in person and like honestly I was impressed. I was impressed by the way he handled ball pressure. I was impressed by his willingness to take simple reads that were available to him. I think that’s such a key to game management and highle ball handling in the NBA. But obviously at the NBA level it gets different once you actually go from summer league to the real NBA. It’s different. His shotmaking for instance in Vegas was so so and inconsistent. He’ll need to learn quickly on the job there. That’s going to be a big swing. And for Anthony Davis, it’s very important that he’s able to play the four because otherwise you won’t be able to find minutes for their center rotation. Like if AD can’t find a way to play the four, then you got to get rid of one of Gaffford or Lively. It’s just a waste of talent on that particular roster, right? But that’s going to require Anthony Davis to reach a certain level of offensive polish that he just hasn’t really shown since the bubble. So all eyes in the early season are going to be on Cooper Flag and Anthony Davis and their overall offensive polish and how well they can handle their elevated roles on that side of the floor compared to what they’ve dealt with in recent years. The lack of roster balance is probably what will take them directly to a first round exit. Like even if Kyrie Irving returns, it’s hard to believe they can beat the top teams in the West with their lack of overall playmaking. But make no mistake, this is still going to be a super fun team to watch and they’re going to win a lot of regular season games. They can take so many different shapes. They can go small like the Lakers lineups with like DLO and Max Christie in the back court, Anthony Davis at the five, Klay Thompson and Cooper Flag in the middle. They can go huge with Derek Lively, Anthony Davis, Cooper Flag, Klay Thompson, and like switch everything with that two through four. Even DLO, if you have to play him with those groups and you need to leave him on an island and switches, you’re backing him up with three ridiculously rangy athletes. So, like if you’re going to play a certain type of switching defense, it would work with DLO in that situation better than it would work anywhere else. like they’re even if they deal with some injuries, they are just so deep with defensive talent that they’re almost certainly going to be a top five defense in the league. I would be stunned if they didn’t lead the league in points in the paint defense or blocked shots. Like they’re going to cause massive problems with their rangy length and athleticism in the front court for teams. They’re ceiling. If you want something more than a first round exit, which is what it’s feels destined for, and maybe second round, if Kyrie can come back, for them to have a ceiling beyond that, it’s going to come down to them pulling off some kind of mid-season trade, what kind of player or players can they get back as they try to balance the roster from the kind of like plethora of talent they have at certain position groups versus the vacancies they have at other groups. I also think this is going to be an interesting test of Jason Kidd. When you don’t have really high level ball handling that can set teams up with set your players up with advantages, then you need to do that schematically. Anthony Davis is not a guy that has shown really high level shot creation in his career. Even just out of the post, he struggled to handle double teams for the majority of his career. So Jason kids schematically is going to have to find ways to make things easier for his ball handlers. Get them with an advantage. Threeman action every time Cooper or Clay’s involved. Get them coming off of multiple screens so they have an easier chance to get downhill and weaponize their skill from that point. Help for DLO in ball screens. a lot of double drags, horn sets, stack action, anything that gets DLO into a situation where it’s easier for him to get downhill into the paint where he can be a problem with his floater and his passing ability. If he can’t get past that initial defender, it’s going to be a lot of tough mid-rangers and tough contested pullup threes. So, like Jason Kid schematically is going to have a a heavier load this year in terms of setting this team up with the advantages they’re going to need with their lack of like supreme advantage creation, if that makes sense. But again, Dallas is going to be a fun team to watch. They’re just another one of these really funky teams in this division.

Jason makes predictions for the upcoming Dallas Mavericks season and breaks down an unbalanced roster with Anthony Davis, Cooper Flagg, Derek Lively, and more in the front court—but says why this is a potentially dangerous group when Kyrie Irving returns.

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