LOS ANGELES — The Dallas Mavericks won 24 of its final 33 regular-season games in 2023-24, even including the two meaningless defeats while resting starters to end the season. They had two winning streaks that reached seven games. Their trade deadline moves fueled their late surge.
There was but one stumble: Shortly after the All-Star break, Dallas lost five games out of six. After the Mavericks’ Game 1 defeat to the L.A. Clippers, a 109-97 thrashing more convincing than the final margin, that brief relapse stood out.
In that 10-day midseason stretch, which featured more than half of the team’s post-trade deadline losses, Dallas’ opponents used one consistent strategy against the how-do-we-guard-him nightmare that is Luka Dončić. While its implementation varied by opponent and personnel, those teams dared Dončić to score. They crowded the paint and took away his lob passes, but rarely sent outright double-teams. When running pick-and-rolls this season, Dončić was blitzed — trapped by multiple defenders — about six times per game. In that five-losses-in-six-games stretch, it was half that (2.9).
And in Sunday’s Game 1, Tyronn Lue’s Clippers never blitzed. Not even once. Even as the Clippers varied their defensive coverages against Dončić, keying in on him as every opponent does, they never double-teamed him above the 3-point line.
“We took what was given to him,” Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said after Monday’s practice. “They didn’t want him to get assists. They were trying to make him a scorer.”
The Mavericks’ eight-point second-quarter stumble, the fewest in any postseason period by any team since 2016, makes clear the Clippers’ approach bothered Dončić. It doesn’t explain what happened; it takes a cacophony of mistakes, poor play and overall numbness to create that type of infamy. But it was the offensive end that caused Dallas to lose Sunday’s series opener and miss its opportunity to seize this series’ lead in Kawhi Leonard’s absence.
To recover in Game 2, the Mavericks must understand what failed so miserably in Game 1.
Dončić initiated most of his offense against Clippers center Ivica Zubac, who he turned into a virtually unplayable liability in these teams’ 2021 first-round matchup. It was a sharp contrast to the Clippers’ approach, which constantly brought up Dončić’s man as a pick-and-roll screener. Dallas rarely targeted LA’s James Harden in the same way.
While Los Angeles varied its defensive pick-and-roll coverages against Dončić, it most often used Zubac in a deep drop, where he planted himself at or even behind the free-throw line like this:
In 2020, these teams’ first postseason matchup, Dončić struggled against Zubac’s drop coverage. He hadn’t fully developed his midrange jumper and he often found himself stuck between shooting contested layups or throwing unavailable alley-oops while Zubac covered up both.
The next season, Dončić honed his in-the-middle scoring. He went from shooting 44 percent in the floater area (shots taken 3-to-10 feet from the rim) to 51 percent, which turned him into one of the league’s deadliest destroyers of drop coverage. (The Milwaukee Bucks, the team most known for deploying this scheme in the last decade, is the opponent Dončić averages the most assists against in his career.) When the Mavericks and Clippers met again in 2021, Dončić obliterated drop coverages and then did the same to Lue’s attempted counter of having Zubac switch the screens.
So why, in Game 1, didn’t it happen again?
Here’s one sequence from Dallas’ woeful second quarter that helps illustrate why.
Down 16 points, Dončić could’ve been frustrated. This was one of the most egregious examples of his impatience and the team-wide non-execution of its primary offensive action, but it was not the only one. Because Zubac had stayed so far back, Dončić should have had a two-on-one advantage to shed his defender. Yet he didn’t even attempt to create one.
Rookie center Dereck Lively II, who screened for him, didn’t expect Dončić’s pirouette and didn’t even touch LA’s Terance Mann, who stays connected to Dončić throughout the play. This one isn’t on Lively, but both he and starting center Daniel Gafford consistently failed to create enough space for Dončić throughout the first half.
“After the first couple screens, I realized that I need to hold screens, I need to hit, and I need to be able to make sure I get the ball handlers open,” Lively said after Monday’s practice. “And sometimes, if I miss, you got to come around and re-screen.”
After Game 1, the team’s consistent messaging was that they weren’t ready for the Clippers’ physicality. That applied to Dončić, too. One of the many features that makes him great is his ability to overwhelm almost any defender due to his sheer size and strength. But especially in Game 1’s first half, he failed at that, like in this example.
Lively’s screen wasn’t quite angled perfectly, a better example of the centers failing to “hit” the defender they intended. But Amir Coffey, Dončić’s defender, still lagged behind Dončić as he navigated around it. Pick-and-roll maestros like Dončić often use this delay to do something that coaches call “putting defenders into jail.”
In layman’s terms: Put your body into the player behind you and make him trivial to what’s ahead. Yet Dončić rushed this possession without that carceral effect, which allowed Coffey to recover in time to prevent the shot. With Zubac this far away, Lively’s poor screen and Dončić’s inability to use his size were equal culprits for what turned into a difficult missed shot from P.J. Washington.
Compare that to 2021, when Dončić created advantages from these situations in virtually every possession. You’ll see Dončić hesitate at the elbow to potentially eliminate the trailing defender, only to not need it because Dwight Powell’s screen had already done that anyway. (This clip comes from The Athletic’s 2021 mid-series article about Dončić’s adjustments to this scheme.)
On Sunday, Dončić didn’t hit these in-between shots. He also missed his stepback 3s, both against the occasional Zubac switch and when his primary defender did get stuck on a ball screen. This season, Dončić’s 3-pointer has earned lethality. It’s unlikely Dončić and Kyrie Irving combine to shoot 5 of 19 in the first half again even if the Mavericks’ superstar duo gets the same shots. But despite their shotmaking prowess, those two players didn’t create good enough looks for many reasons, many of which stemmed from the Mavericks’ problems attacking the Clippers’ aforementioned pick-and-roll defensive strategy.
While Lue designed his game plan around turning Dončić into a scorer and not outright double-teaming, the Clippers still did send help. The Clippers aggressively crowded the paint, using off-ball defenders to sag off corner shooters, tag whichever big men were rolling into the lane and occupy space Dončić might otherwise be tempted to use.
Too often, Dončić slowed down at the sight of multiple bodies in front of him, picking up his dribble at the elbow rather than probing deeper into the paint. When he did manage to get closer to the basket, he created opportunities at the rim due to his passing brilliance. Although the play below ended with a missed lob dunk for Lively that Zubac contested well, it was still likelier to be points for the Mavericks than not due to Dončić’s short-range touch in crowded spaces.
But while the Clippers players shaded into the paint, like Harden in the above image, they also stayed close enough to the shooters around Dončić. This iteration of the Mavericks might be the most talented in the Dončić era, and it’s certainly the most athletic. But it also might feature the worst group of shooters Dončić has ever played with for this franchise.
Many of Dončić’s current teammates can knock down shots, but few fire at will. While the corner 3’s value comes from its closer distance to the rim, it also yields the shortest closeout for an extended defender. By helping without outright doubling, the Clippers effectively walled off the paint without needing to scramble to close back out to the perimeter. Dončić can spook any team into helping too much if he’s torching them, as can Irving, but neither player did that enough in the first half.
While the second half provided mild optimism about the Mavericks’ adjustments, it should be noted that Lue said it was designed within the Clippers’ scheme.
“In the fourth quarter, they got going a little bit. But, you know, we took our defensive schemes off because we didn’t want to give up 3s. We was up 26 points. And so you don’t want to give up 3s to guys making 3s,” Lue said after Monday’s practice. “That’s the best way to come back. They kind of got going one-on-one, you know, which we expect them to do when you play them one-on-one.”
Dallas’ most effective adjustments won’t come from what the team did in Game 1’s second half. They’ll come from what the team has always known Dončić to do to exploit conservative coverages like drop. They must also come from the role players, who must make more shots and act more decisively against defenders recovering from them.
There are schematic changes Dallas can make to capitalize on the schemes the Clippers used in Game 1 — although Lue, a tinkerer whose best coaching comes in the postseason, isn’t guaranteed to just copy-paste the same strategy for Tuesday’s game. Dallas could choose another path, such as using Harden’s assignment as a screener. Kidd must decide if he should stick with the Game 1 plan, hoping his team does it better or pragmatically refocus his team’s motivations for Game 2. In this league, on-court execution matters more than any specific coach-inspired strategy.
Still, just to name one small adjustment that did work in the second half, Dallas found far more success on stack sequences — ones with two screeners involved in the primary action rather than one — than it did on singular pick-and-roll initiations. Like this play, this play and the one below.
Leonard’s return looms over this series, and Game 1’s defeat remains an enormous missed opportunity for Dallas. But the Mavericks have more advantages in this matchup than the Clippers do until that happens, and that’s assuming he comes back as the exact top-10-at-worst player he was this regular season.
Ultimately, Leonard’s absence may provide the Mavericks leeway to mess around too much in the first half of Game 1, use that stretch as an experiment for what adjustments might work and provide tape for what should have been an invigorating film session pointing.
“The keyword is series: It’s not just one game,” Kidd said. “Yes, we would like to (have) won the first game. Unfortunately, we have not. We’ve made adjustments. This is paying attention to detail, understanding what we have to do better for Game 2 to win.”
They should understand, especially Dončić, who has been here before. But they must show that in Game 2, which now awaits.
(Top photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)
