Ten Dallas Mavericks storylines to think about before the NBA’s return to play由Mavs.Ben 发表在Big D https://bbs.hupu.com/688
The details for the NBA’s restart keep trickling out from the various meetings and proposals taking place. We’re still weeks away from the July 31 planned resumption date, which means we also still have weeks before the plans take on their final form. But we largely know what will take place in Orlando, where 22 teams will congregate for a shambolic regular season of sorts before moving on to the strangest postseason in history. For more, you can read Shams Charania’s latest reporting on what the league and the National Basketball Player’s Association has agreed to.
Last week, I talked with Saad Yousuf about some general topics related to the Mavericks resuming basketball this season. This article is intended to get more specific with exact storylines we’ll see.
1. How healthy will the team be?
Dallas won’t have Dwight Powell or Jalen Brunson, something Rick Carlisle confirmed on 103.3 ESPN Radio last week. Powell will miss the entire season; Brunson, potentially, could return several weeks into the restart, but even that seems unlikely. When Brunson underwent his shoulder surgery on March 13, he was given no timetable for return. Those types of surgeries usually involve three-to-six month recoveries. It still makes sense to plan for him missing the rest of the season.
Beyond that, the team should begin training camp, head into exhibition games and then the shortened regular season with a healthy roster. Seth Curry had suffered an ankle sprain, Willie Cauley-Stein had missed games for personal reasons and other players were dealing with various ailments, but those were March problems, not July ones. If new injuries appear, Dallas can deal with them then. But as far as we know, the team is otherwise healthy.
2. When will the international players report back to Dallas?
Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis both returned to Slovenia and Latvia, respectively, but are expected to be back in their home market on June 15. That’s actually six days sooner than when all players are told to report on June 21, seven days before coronavirus testing begins on June 22 and about two weeks before the league asks teams to fully resume with a home market training camp from June 30 to July 7, at which point teams travel to Orlando. It’s all about the quarantines that are needed to take place.
3. What will Luka Doncic look like when he returns to the court?
I suspect Doncic will look even better than he did in the waning weeks of the regular season, when the fatigue and end-of-season exhaustion seemed to get to him, a consistent theme with his career. This isn’t a shot or complaint about his conditioning. I believe Doncic started the 2019-20 season in the best shape of his entire life. But because he’s asked to do more on the court than 99 percent of the league’s players, he has to prepare accordingly. The 21-year-old has been working out regularly with a Slovenian strength coach named Jure Draskler, who is currently employed by BC Khimki Moscow Region, a Russian professional team. I’m not worried about Doncic coming back out of shape or anything like that, but I am interested in seeing whether he looks like the Doncic of October and November or the one dragging slightly in March. Obviously, a rejuvenated Doncic would help Dallas a great deal in the final games.
4. How quickly will the offense return to form?
Dallas will not win games with its defense this season. That’s OK. The Mavericks were on pace to have the best offense in league history by efficiency this season, and they will need to quickly regain that form to continue having success in this resumed season. This question is directly related to the one above. If Doncic is at his best, then the offense should be, too. Doncic is the heliocentric figure on the team, after all, and his distribution alone powers Dallas to at least 110 points every 100 possessions no matter if the plays are run sharply or the rust shows.
5. Will Dallas be hurt by its reliance on 3-point shooting?
It’s worth asking whether the league will see an overall drop in 3-point percentage. I tend to think it won’t, but it’s hard to say. This isn’t a repeatable scenario; we’re all adjusting our expectations as new data becomes available. This season, Dallas has hit 36.9 percent of its shots from distance, good for eighth overall, while taking the second-most in the league. Any major slippage from those numbers would certainly affect them negatively.
6. Can Dallas use the limited regular season to change its playoff seeding?
Dallas is 1.5 games back from Houston and Oklahoma City. Since every team will play only eight regular-season games, that half-game difference means Dallas must win two more than either the Rockets or the Thunder to pass them in the standings. Tiebreakers will not factor into this. It’s a tough ask. But if Dallas can win at least five of its eight games, it seems possible that the team could move up with some luck on their side, something that would gratefully match them up against, most likely, the Nuggets.
It was more likely Dallas could catch the teams in front of them with the full 15 games left in the regular season. But it’s conceivable that a rested, focused Mavericks team would crush the remaining regular-season games. All season long, the team has looked more threatening than their record suggests, as indicated by Dallas’ net rating being the sixth-best in the league.
7. Will the season continue unscathed despite laxer coronavirus policies?
This is a cautious reminder that while other leagues such as the German Bundesliga have returned successfully, there is no such guarantee in the United States. As of today, Florida is barely reducing the spread of coronavirus, with each positive case transmitting to a new person at an average rate of 0.99. That’s basically dead even and very different from, say, Germany. The NBA appears to have picked the best possible option for resumption with a bubble plan that limits unnecessary attendees as much as possible. It still has many hard-to-control variables, though, namely necessary hotel and arena staff who may or may not be fully contained within this same bubble. Let’s just hope this decision to bring back basketball goes on unscathed despite those concerns.
8. What will it mean that the Mavericks won’t have to play at home?
This may actually be good news, as Dallas’ 21-12 away record is better than anyone in the Western Conference but the Lakers. While I’ve written all year that home-vs.-away records might just be small sample size theater, it’s amusing that Dallas fans actually got their wish to no longer play games at the American Airlines Center this season, something that was joked about frequently as the team kept dropping results on their home floor.
9. Who would the Mavericks add if rosters are expanded?
And, yes, this seems like a possibility. Here’s The Athletic’s Jared Weiss:
There has been progress toward creating an injury replacement exemption to account for players becoming unavailable due to injury or testing positive for COVID-19 during training camp and the regular season at Orlando’s Disney World, with a final plan expected to be negotiated between the National Basketball Players Association and NBA this week. While the league has been apprehensive about a proposal to activate two-way players for training camp and the eight-game regular season, front-office sources from several teams have told The Athletic it should at least be allowed if a roster player is ruled out.
If this were to happen and expanded beyond two-way players, Ryan Broekhoff seems like a more likely candidate than either Antonius Cleveland or Josh Reaves, two players who were never trusted this season for key minutes by Rick Carlisle. I like both prospects, but neither was imminently pushing to break into the rotation. Broekhoff, however, was an unfortunate victim of Dwight Powell’s injury not being eligible for the disabled player exception rule. He’s trusted to play minutes and isn’t signed elsewhere right now. Dallas would happily bring him back if the scenario arose. Likewise, I could even see Devin Harris on the team’s radar before Cleveland or Reaves. But it’s also likely the NBA will shoot down these proposals and ask teams to play with who they have.
10. How will the odd nature of this resumption affect Dallas?
Look, someone will be affected by good or bad luck. It is possible an opposing player will come down with a positive coronavirus test right before a series is set to begin, which would send him into a 10-day quarantine. It’s certain players will suffer injuries at increased rates based on data we have from other sports league resumptions. All this is understood when the NBA chose to restart this season.
It’s not fairness they’re aiming for. It’s about money and the completion of a season not quite finished. Which, when you consider what the NBA is, a massive, international money-making corporation, is fine if safety can be assured. (It feels pointless to even try to decide where this falls on the safe-to-unsafe spectrum since the league is powering forward regardless.) Maybe the eventual champion, if we hopefully get that far, will have an asterisk. Maybe we have a massive first-round upset that would have almost certainly not happened under normal circumstances. Maybe the Clippers win like many were predicting in early March before this became serious, and all is “right” with the world. But it’s certain that some team or some players will feel cheated, certain that someone else will be the beneficiary of that luck going their direction. If it happens to Dallas, who knows? Maybe this team storms as far as the conference finals. Maybe not. Just don’t try too hard to predict what will happen.
https://theathletic.com/1856665/2020/06/09/ten-dallas-mavericks-storylines-to-think-about-before-the-nbas-return-to-play/
The details for the NBA’s restart keep trickling out from the various meetings and proposals taking place. We’re still weeks away from the July 31 planned resumption date, which means we also still have weeks before the plans take on their final form. But we largely know what will take place in Orlando, where 22 teams will congregate for a shambolic regular season of sorts before moving on to the strangest postseason in history. For more, you can read Shams Charania’s latest reporting on what the league and the National Basketball Player’s Association has agreed to.
Last week, I talked with Saad Yousuf about some general topics related to the Mavericks resuming basketball this season. This article is intended to get more specific with exact storylines we’ll see.
1. How healthy will the team be?
Dallas won’t have Dwight Powell or Jalen Brunson, something Rick Carlisle confirmed on 103.3 ESPN Radio last week. Powell will miss the entire season; Brunson, potentially, could return several weeks into the restart, but even that seems unlikely. When Brunson underwent his shoulder surgery on March 13, he was given no timetable for return. Those types of surgeries usually involve three-to-six month recoveries. It still makes sense to plan for him missing the rest of the season.
Beyond that, the team should begin training camp, head into exhibition games and then the shortened regular season with a healthy roster. Seth Curry had suffered an ankle sprain, Willie Cauley-Stein had missed games for personal reasons and other players were dealing with various ailments, but those were March problems, not July ones. If new injuries appear, Dallas can deal with them then. But as far as we know, the team is otherwise healthy.
2. When will the international players report back to Dallas?
Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis both returned to Slovenia and Latvia, respectively, but are expected to be back in their home market on June 15. That’s actually six days sooner than when all players are told to report on June 21, seven days before coronavirus testing begins on June 22 and about two weeks before the league asks teams to fully resume with a home market training camp from June 30 to July 7, at which point teams travel to Orlando. It’s all about the quarantines that are needed to take place.
3. What will Luka Doncic look like when he returns to the court?
I suspect Doncic will look even better than he did in the waning weeks of the regular season, when the fatigue and end-of-season exhaustion seemed to get to him, a consistent theme with his career. This isn’t a shot or complaint about his conditioning. I believe Doncic started the 2019-20 season in the best shape of his entire life. But because he’s asked to do more on the court than 99 percent of the league’s players, he has to prepare accordingly. The 21-year-old has been working out regularly with a Slovenian strength coach named Jure Draskler, who is currently employed by BC Khimki Moscow Region, a Russian professional team. I’m not worried about Doncic coming back out of shape or anything like that, but I am interested in seeing whether he looks like the Doncic of October and November or the one dragging slightly in March. Obviously, a rejuvenated Doncic would help Dallas a great deal in the final games.
4. How quickly will the offense return to form?
Dallas will not win games with its defense this season. That’s OK. The Mavericks were on pace to have the best offense in league history by efficiency this season, and they will need to quickly regain that form to continue having success in this resumed season. This question is directly related to the one above. If Doncic is at his best, then the offense should be, too. Doncic is the heliocentric figure on the team, after all, and his distribution alone powers Dallas to at least 110 points every 100 possessions no matter if the plays are run sharply or the rust shows.
5. Will Dallas be hurt by its reliance on 3-point shooting?
It’s worth asking whether the league will see an overall drop in 3-point percentage. I tend to think it won’t, but it’s hard to say. This isn’t a repeatable scenario; we’re all adjusting our expectations as new data becomes available. This season, Dallas has hit 36.9 percent of its shots from distance, good for eighth overall, while taking the second-most in the league. Any major slippage from those numbers would certainly affect them negatively.
6. Can Dallas use the limited regular season to change its playoff seeding?
Dallas is 1.5 games back from Houston and Oklahoma City. Since every team will play only eight regular-season games, that half-game difference means Dallas must win two more than either the Rockets or the Thunder to pass them in the standings. Tiebreakers will not factor into this. It’s a tough ask. But if Dallas can win at least five of its eight games, it seems possible that the team could move up with some luck on their side, something that would gratefully match them up against, most likely, the Nuggets.
It was more likely Dallas could catch the teams in front of them with the full 15 games left in the regular season. But it’s conceivable that a rested, focused Mavericks team would crush the remaining regular-season games. All season long, the team has looked more threatening than their record suggests, as indicated by Dallas’ net rating being the sixth-best in the league.
7. Will the season continue unscathed despite laxer coronavirus policies?
This is a cautious reminder that while other leagues such as the German Bundesliga have returned successfully, there is no such guarantee in the United States. As of today, Florida is barely reducing the spread of coronavirus, with each positive case transmitting to a new person at an average rate of 0.99. That’s basically dead even and very different from, say, Germany. The NBA appears to have picked the best possible option for resumption with a bubble plan that limits unnecessary attendees as much as possible. It still has many hard-to-control variables, though, namely necessary hotel and arena staff who may or may not be fully contained within this same bubble. Let’s just hope this decision to bring back basketball goes on unscathed despite those concerns.
8. What will it mean that the Mavericks won’t have to play at home?
This may actually be good news, as Dallas’ 21-12 away record is better than anyone in the Western Conference but the Lakers. While I’ve written all year that home-vs.-away records might just be small sample size theater, it’s amusing that Dallas fans actually got their wish to no longer play games at the American Airlines Center this season, something that was joked about frequently as the team kept dropping results on their home floor.
9. Who would the Mavericks add if rosters are expanded?
And, yes, this seems like a possibility. Here’s The Athletic’s Jared Weiss:
There has been progress toward creating an injury replacement exemption to account for players becoming unavailable due to injury or testing positive for COVID-19 during training camp and the regular season at Orlando’s Disney World, with a final plan expected to be negotiated between the National Basketball Players Association and NBA this week. While the league has been apprehensive about a proposal to activate two-way players for training camp and the eight-game regular season, front-office sources from several teams have told The Athletic it should at least be allowed if a roster player is ruled out.
If this were to happen and expanded beyond two-way players, Ryan Broekhoff seems like a more likely candidate than either Antonius Cleveland or Josh Reaves, two players who were never trusted this season for key minutes by Rick Carlisle. I like both prospects, but neither was imminently pushing to break into the rotation. Broekhoff, however, was an unfortunate victim of Dwight Powell’s injury not being eligible for the disabled player exception rule. He’s trusted to play minutes and isn’t signed elsewhere right now. Dallas would happily bring him back if the scenario arose. Likewise, I could even see Devin Harris on the team’s radar before Cleveland or Reaves. But it’s also likely the NBA will shoot down these proposals and ask teams to play with who they have.
10. How will the odd nature of this resumption affect Dallas?
Look, someone will be affected by good or bad luck. It is possible an opposing player will come down with a positive coronavirus test right before a series is set to begin, which would send him into a 10-day quarantine. It’s certain players will suffer injuries at increased rates based on data we have from other sports league resumptions. All this is understood when the NBA chose to restart this season.
It’s not fairness they’re aiming for. It’s about money and the completion of a season not quite finished. Which, when you consider what the NBA is, a massive, international money-making corporation, is fine if safety can be assured. (It feels pointless to even try to decide where this falls on the safe-to-unsafe spectrum since the league is powering forward regardless.) Maybe the eventual champion, if we hopefully get that far, will have an asterisk. Maybe we have a massive first-round upset that would have almost certainly not happened under normal circumstances. Maybe the Clippers win like many were predicting in early March before this became serious, and all is “right” with the world. But it’s certain that some team or some players will feel cheated, certain that someone else will be the beneficiary of that luck going their direction. If it happens to Dallas, who knows? Maybe this team storms as far as the conference finals. Maybe not. Just don’t try too hard to predict what will happen.
https://theathletic.com/1856665/2020/06/09/ten-dallas-mavericks-storylines-to-think-about-before-the-nbas-return-to-play/
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