Daniel Gafford suffered Grade 3 right MCL sprain, per ESPN

The Dallas Mavericks center is expected to miss significant time

The Dallas Mavericks will be without the services of center Daniel Gafford for the foreseeable future, according to Shams Charania and Tim MacMahon of ESPN. Following the Dallas win over the Miami Heat, the newsmakers tweeted the following:

The news keeps getting worse for the Dallas Mavericks, who were already without Anthony Davis for at least several more weeks and Dereck Lively until as early as late March. The Mavericks have also been without rarely used center Dwight Powell, who’s missed 14 straight games with a hip injury.

In typical Shams fashion, the tweet is bafflingly worded, noting that all Dallas big men are expected to be out “significant stretches of the second half of the season”. Considering Dallas has played 56 games to date, that’s 68% of the regular season. We’re already well into the second half of the season.

Injury data expert Jeff Stotts of InStreetCloths.com had the following to add:

For those of us who aren’t the best at math, the average time of this injury without surgery is 26 games missed. There are only 26 games left in the regular season for the Dallas Mavericks. In other words, in the initial Shams tweet, the words “at least” do some heavy lifting and manage to understate the severity of what’s occurred here.

Though Dallas signed Kylor Kelly to a two-way contract, the Mavericks have played two and a half games with a small-ball line up. Olivier-Maxence Prosper has played reasonably well as small center in these line ups, but he is a patch-work solution at best.

What Dallas does from here is anyone’s guess as this team does not have any quit, despite being vertically challenged. But with All-Star break to rest, recoup, and weigh options, we’ll have plenty of time to speculate about what Dallas can do from here.