The Dallas Mavericks defeated the Utah Jazz yet again, this time 138-120Saturday afternoon in Dallas. It\u2019s the Mavericks second-straight game, and second straight offensive explosion against a Jazz team that has mostly shown little interest in winning across the two games.<\/p>\n
This was almost a carbon copy of the Mavericks win on Thursday night, except for the Jazz showing some semblance of shame in the third quarter. Outside of that third quarter, the Mavericks have absolutely embarrassed this Jazz team across the two games, despite the Mavericks missing numerous starters and key players.<\/p>\n
Cooper Flagg and Daniel Gafford once again did not suit up due to ankle injuries suffered against Denver last week. PJ Washington is battling injuries as well, but was probable for this game before being a late scratch due to personal reasons. Dallas once again relied on lots of minutes from two-way players and even a 10-day contract player signed on Thursday. It didn\u2019t matter \u2014 Dallas led from wire-to-wire once again.<\/p>\n
Klay Thompson was the key igniter once again, scoring 23 points in the first half and torching the Jazz in a variety of ways. That instant offense off the bench basically carried the Mavericks to a double-digit lead and the team never looked back. Jazz guard Keyonte George finally decided to be the first Jazz player to realize that trying hard is important in basketball and scored 21 points in the third to prevent this from being a complete joke of a game. Utah cut the lead to nine early in the fourth, but the Mavericks stomped out that rally pretty quickly after that and the Jazz meekly conceded the game.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what we noticed from this one.<\/p>\n
The Mavericks are professionals, and that should matter<\/p>\n
Dallas\u2019 season is effectively over. The team is 12th in the West, and two losses behind Memphis at 11. The teams in seventh, eighth, and ninth are all surging too and want to win \u2014 the Warriors and Trail Blazers are 7-3 in their last 10 and the Clippers are 8-2. Those teams aren\u2019t slowing down anytime soon, so combine that with all the Mavericks injuries and Dallas doesn\u2019t really have a postseason to look forward to in April.<\/p>\n
Despite that, the team continues to play hard. I worried after Davis got hurt again and the Mavericks were blown out by Chicago that perhaps the team had finally reached a breaking point and would naturally let go of the rope after fighting so hard despite being so short-handed for the last three months. Instead the Mavericks have won three of their last four since that Bulls blowout loss, and even the loss was a mostly competitive game against the Denver Nuggets.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure what all this means. Dallas, on paper, needs to lose as often as possible to secure the best draft pick they can later this June, the last first rounder Dallas has direct control over until 2031. But the Mavericks still have lots of pieces from the 2024 Finals team, they still have Klay Thompson and Naji Marshall, who were brought in to bring that 2024 roster over the hump and win that elusive title. Even with all the injuries the Mavericks just have too many good players to be totally hopeless, even with some brutal losses this season to bad teams like the Wizards and the Pelicans.<\/p>\n
So say what you will about coach Jason Kidd, but he has instilled a culture of accountability and competitiveness within this organization. These guys play fucking hard. They don\u2019t quit, even in the games they eventually lose. The Mavericks have played a zillion clutch games regardless of the quality of the opponent. They\u2019ve beaten the Nuggets twice, the Rockets twice, and the Pistons once. They\u2019ve lost 26 games but less than a handful of those were uncompetitive blowouts. They have more wins against teams at .500 or better than you\u2019d expect for a team in 12th place.<\/p>\n
Call me old fashioned but that means something. Losing is an awfully hard stench to clean off, and the Mavericks coaching staff has instilled a sense of purpose with this organization, even despite all the buffoonery happening off the court around this team in the last 18 months. The players didn\u2019t trade Luka Doncic, they didn\u2019t try to make Anthony Davis the centerpiece of the team. They didn\u2019t alienate the fans, and they played hard through injuries even when the organization should have known better to keep them healthy. All they\u2019ve done is play hard as hell, and win a few more games than anyone should reasonably expect from them considering the circumstances.<\/p>\n
Whenever the Mavericks are good again, or at least playoff-bound, these moments will resonate. Dallas is laying the foundation of the next great Mavericks team. That matters.<\/p>\n
The Jazz are an embarrassment and should be kicked out of the league<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never seen a more embarrassing effort across two games like the Jazz just did on Thursday and Saturday, and this is coming from the same team that lost by 55 points to the Hornets a week ago.<\/p>\n
Dallas should not have won these games. Ryan Nembhard, Moussa Cisse, and Miles Kelly are all two-way contract rookies and all three played heavy minutes due to the Mavericks injuries. Dallas signed Jeremiah Robinsin-Earl to a 10-day contract on Thursday before the game, and he played over 20 minutes in each one. Even with the Jazz shameless resting healthy players like Jusuf Nurkic, there\u2019s still enough talent on this roster to not only stay competitive, but quite frankly defeat this limited Mavericks team.<\/p>\n
Instead the Mavericks almost set their franchise record for points scored in regulation on Thursday, and followed that up with 138 points on Saturday. This is a Dallas team that even at full-health is one of the worst offensive teams in the league and the Jazz made them look like the Showtime Lakers.<\/p>\n
This is a disgrace. The NBA can never really rid the league of tanking, but there\u2019s tanking and then there\u2019s whatever the hell this Jazz team did in the last eight quarters of basketball. They didn\u2019t try, they were disinterested and they wasted everyone\u2019s time. They wasted the 15 Jazz fans still watching these games, they wasted the time of the travel party and trainers and anyone else that had to work these games. They honestly wasted my time as well, since while it\u2019s fun to see the Mavericks blow the doors off a team, these games were so shamelessly uncompetitive that it\u2019s hard to really take anything real away from this game. It felt like a scrimmage or open practice.<\/p>\n
The Jazz shouldn\u2019t be allowed on television for the rest of the season. They\u2019re on their fourth straight season of the organization not caring about winning and shockingly it appears the players don\u2019t give a shit about winning either. They are developing losing habits and those habits will be extremely hard to break whenever the team feels like trying again. Honestly at this rate though we\u2019ll probably experience the heat death of the universe before the Jazz feel like trying again.<\/p>\n
Professional basketball is an entertainment product. It\u2019s an entertainment product in an age where entertainment has never been so numerous and accessible. Go back 10 or 15 years, and watching your local basketball team on TV was one of the few things you could do. When I was in high school in the mid-2000s, I could watch the Mavericks, watch whatever was on cable, watch whatever movies or TV shows I had on DVD or play whatever video games I owned. Now I have access to virtually every movie and TV show ever made at instant speed, and I don\u2019t even need to buy video games anymore \u2014 the most popular games in the world are persistent, free-to-play experiences. Good lord I haven\u2019t even talked about all the shit you can do outside now. Have you been out there lately? There\u2019s so much stuff.<\/p>\n
So why the hell would anyone watch what we just watched today? The NBA has structured itself to basically ignore 75 percent or more of the product because you\u2019re not missing much. The incentives to watch suck, the players regularly don\u2019t care, and the orgs don\u2019t care either. So many games have missing stars, injured regulars, or at least one team that could care less about the outcome. It\u2019s horrible. And I don\u2019t care about the NBA\u2019s TV ratings or revenue numbers, I just care as someone that likes the NBA and wants to continue engaging with it. If these games don\u2019t matter and the players don\u2019t care, why should I? I can just quit doing this stupid second job and go spend my time outside or something.<\/p>\n
The Jazz can go to hell. Eat my shorts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dallas Mavericks defeated the Utah Jazz yet again, this time 138-120Saturday afternoon in Dallas. It\u2019s the Mavericks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3785],"tags":[7,423,39459,52332,6,422,427,3972],"class_list":{"0":"post-544236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-utah-jazz","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-jazz","10":"tag-mavericks-game-coverage","11":"tag-mavericks-scores","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-utah","14":"tag-utah-jazz","15":"tag-utahjazz"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115914658615065080","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}