Dallas drops a heartbreaker to Miami
The Dallas Mavericks lost another close game, this time a 123-118 defeat to the Miami Heat Sunday in Miami.
It was a strange game in the sense of it felt like the Mavericks were doing better than the scoreboard indicated. Dallas started hot, but sloppy play from the second unit resulted in a lot of catch-up moments, and the Mavericks could never really get comfortably over the hump.
Kyrie Irving led the team with 27 points, although on poor shooting numbers. This was another game without star Luka Doncic, who is out with a right wrist sprain and is expected to miss the next two games against Atlanta and New York this week.
Jimmy Butler had a huge game, leading the Heat with 33 points, including the game-tying dunk in the final seconds that sent the game to overtime.
Here are the numbers we noticed.
-59: Combined bench plus/minus
I’m being a bit cheeky with the numbers here, as the entire bench combined for a minus-59 in plus-minus tonight. Obviously the Mavericks bench minutes didn’t get outscored by 59 points or this game would have been over well-before there was a chance of overtime. But I’m just highlight this number to showcase how truly wretched the bench play was for the Mavericks tonight.
No bench player was positive in plus-minus. The bench trip of Maxi Kleber, Jaden Hardy, and Spencer Dinwiddie played 46 minutes and shot a combined 1-of-19 and scored 7 points, with Dinwiddie soaking up 28 of those minutes and scoring the seven points.
Even Naji Marshall, who ended the game on a scoring tear, didn’t play well in the first half that allowed the Heat to take a halftime lead into the locker room. It was a total effort from the bench that letdown the team in every way. If the Mavericks got mediocre-to-average play from its bench tonight, they likely win the game by 15 points.
Dinwiddie checked into the game with a little under five minutes left in the third quarter and then never came back out. He played the rest of the third, and the entire fourth quarter and overtime periods. He passed well with seven assists and no turnovers, had a huge block down the stretch, but the Heat did not care about guarding him and Dinwiddie did not make them pay. A baffling lineup decision when all of the starters were playing well.
19: Corner 3 attempts for Miami
Dallas’ defensively philosophy is simple, but effective: wall off the rim and the paint, cut off the easiest and most consistent shot in basketball (layups), don’t help too much from the corners. The Mavericks concede a fair amount of above-the-break threes, gambling that those shots are less consistent than layups, dunks, and corner threes. Sometimes Dallas gets smoked by a hot shooting team, but their paint presence really makes things hard for opposing offenses.
That didn’t happen tonight, as Miami attempted 19 corner threes, making eight of them. It’s the most corner threes the Mavericks allowed to a single team all season, and it scrambled the Mavericks defense in a lot of ways.
8: 2nd quarter turnovers
Dallas had 14 turnovers total, with eight coming during a second quarter that saw the Mavericks trail by as many as 10 points.
If the Mavericks take care of the ball better in the second quarter, there’s a good chance they win the game. As mentioned in an earlier point, the bench contributed a lot to the sloppiness during that second quarter, as the Maveicks couldn’t find any quality offense when Kyrie Irving hit the bench.
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