Monday Musings: Mavericks failures this season go beyond Lamar Odom
sinbapointforward.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/lamar-is.jpgThe Mavericks essentially deactivated Lamar Odom for the rest of the season. (Glenn James/NBAE/Getty Images)
Lamar Odom is famous because he is on some awful reality show and once served as a hugely valuable member of multiple title teams. So his failure this season with the Mavericks, culminating with their decision Monday to essentially deactivate him, will be viewed as a crucial reason for their demise if they lose in the first round of the playoffs assuming they even get there.
Odom was a disaster this season, out of shape and out of sorts, but he wasnt even supposed to be part of the plan. He was a gift, a what the heck? bit of good luck on the trade market, and the attention to his failures has masked all the other reasons Dallas has regressed as a scoring team to the point that it ranks 23rd in points per possession with no signs of improvement coming.
Last season, the Mavs made important structural changes to their offense, adjustments that fit their personnel and recognized the teams age. They transformed themselves from a mid-range team into one that took a ton of three-point shots, open perimeter looks they got by running multiple pick-and-roll combinations, spacing the floor well and whipping the ball around the court with precision. They finished with the eighth-best offense in the league, and then, remarkably, they improved by about three points per 100 possessions in the playoffs when offense generally drops and blew the doors off everyone they faced.
No team assisted on a higher percentage of its field-goal tries. Only the Magic shot the ball more efficiently in the last eight seconds of the shot clock, per
82games.com, evidence of how well the Mavs moved the ball and players until a defense finally broke. Only five teams got a higher percentage of their shots in those final eight seconds, evidence of how important patience was to Dallas scoring success. Only San Antonio and New York attempted more corner three-pointers, a shot for which Dallas showed no real affection until last season.
The Mavs didnt get to the free-throw line all that much, had little use for offensive rebounds and turned the ball over at an average rate. In short: Other than Dirk Nowitzki post-ups and the mid-range shots that remained (mostly for Dirk and Jason Terry), Dallas relied almost entirely on getting a good first look near the rim or from three-point range, and making it.
For reasons well beyond Odoms failure, the Mavs have been unable to function this way in 2011-12. Even more damaging, there is no fall-back plan on an aging team with no consistent off-the-dribble creator on the perimeter.
Odom is a decent creator and absolutely could have helped, had he showed up ready to compete at a high level. The Mavs, at the very least, need a backup power forward capable of keeping the offense afloat when Nowitzki sits, and
coach Rick Carlisle showed creativity in fitting Odom amid intriguing super-big lineups in which he was essentially the small forward.
It was a risk worth taking, and it didnt work. But the Mavs issues go far beyond Odoms.
Rodrigue Beaubois was supposed to fill the role as a go-to perimeter creator. He has advanced in small increments, but he does not get to the rim as often as J.J. Barea did, he is not as accomplished a passer and his outside shooting 28 percent from three-point range
remains a liability that hurts the Mavs precious spacing. Delonte West helped early, but injuries to his hand and ankle have stunted his progress, and his game has always featured more step-back 15-footers than at-the-rim drives and dishes. Pairing Beaubois and Jason Terry, intended to be a facsimile of the dangerous Barea/Terry little-man duo, improved Dallas offense in the 685 minutes theyve shared, but it hasnt been enough to change the larger picture.
Using West and Terry together has been a disaster, and teaming Jason Kidd with just about anyone has been hard to watch.
Kidd long ago evolved into a spot-up shooter assigned to hit open three-pointers and pick apart defenses with passing from beyond the three-point arc. But that evolution might have passed a breaking point. Nearly 82 percent of Kidds field-goal tries this season have been threes, up from about 65 percent last season.
His assists per minute have reached a career low by a huge margin, and his increase in turnovers has sabotaged what remains of Dallas transition game. The Mavs rank 29th in points per possession on fast-break chances,
per Synergy Sports. Kidd was at least a nominal threat to do something other than shoot threes last season, but he has not been this season. His passing, always a step ahead of rotating defenses, is less valuable now that Dallas spot-up shooting game is less dangerous.
The Mavs have redistributed a significant chunk of their three-point attempts about 1.5 per game from the corner to other areas, and they miss the spot-up brilliance of Peja Stojakovic and the version of DeShawn Stevenson that showed up last season.
Teams can generate good looks without an All-Star type on the perimeter if they have an explosive big-man finisher to use on pick-and-rolls, but Brendan Haywood is not in Tyson Chandlers league in that sense. Dallas has suffered more on offense for its decision to let Chandler go and stock up on cap space this summer. Chandler shot nearly 70 percent on three attempts per game last season out of pick-and-rolls and cuts, and when defenses fouled him, he made them pay by morphing into a league-average foul shooter. Haywood has attempted only about 1.5 shots per game from pick-and-rolls and cuts, and he is simply not a threat to catch the ball from 10 feet out and do something productive with it. He is slow and needs time to gather himself after catching, and in that time, his defender can recover well enough to either contest a shot effectively or foul. Haywood has shot just 46 percent from the line, and thats actually an improvement over last season.
The Mavs feasted last season by using Chandler on the pick-and-roll and stationing Nowitzki along the perimeter as an outlet. Such action removed a big man (Nowitzkis defender) from the paint and spared Nowitzki some of the shot-creation burden. Though Dallas has tried to approximate it using Brandan Wright and Ian Mahinmi along with Haywood, it cannot approximate last seasons results.
Nowitzki is still hugely effective in the post and as a pick-and-pop threat so dangerous that defenders often stay glued to him, opening driving lanes for the Mavs guards. But those guards havent been able to do as much with those driving lanes this season, and even when they can, the shooting around them is not as deadly. Even Shawn Marions off-ball cutting, an alternative way of creating space for a non-shooter (see Avery Bradley in Boston), has dropped off over the course of the season, along with his post game, perhaps the result of cumulative fatigue from defending so many star point guards early.
Bottom line:
The video tape and numbers literally almost any kind of numbers you might choose indicate a total system failure. The Mavs have dropped from first in assist rate to middle of the pack, suggesting that the easy buckets at the rim and the open threes just arent there. They still get a disproportionate number of field-goal attempts in the last four seconds of the shot clock, but they rank as one of the leagues dozen worst-shooting teams on such attempts, per 82games.com.
And try as he might, Carlisle just hasnt been able to find enough lineups and player pairings super-big, super-small, whatever that work consistently.
Mixing and matching is key on an aging team, especially one that has suffered short-term injuries to so many key players this season.
Only the Nets, Bobcats, Nuggets, Hornets and Raptors have played their most common five-man unit fewer minutes than Dallas has played its No. 1 minutes-logging group. Few teams have played so many units at least 30 minutes combined, suggesting that Carlisle and his staff have tinkered more than most.
The Mavs will probably make the playoffs because the hardest part of their schedule is over and they have tiebreakers already in hand over all four teams right around them in the Western Conference standings (Utah, Phoenix, Denver and Houston). Things could get very dicey if the Mavs dont do well in their next three games, against the Warriors, Kings and Trail Blazers, but they should still sneak in as the No. 7 or No. 8 seed.
That will be disappointing for the defending champions, especially because it would mean a meeting with either San Antonio or Oklahoma City. Odoms play didnt help, but it is just one of many factors contributing to the root cause of Dallas decline.
