Tonight you will be haunted… by three reasons to watch tomorrow’s game!

“I’m alive and so are you!” – Scrooged

Ho Ho Ho, MFFL’ers!

Here we are, once again, washing ourselves in the merry festivities of Christmas Eve… stockings hung by the chimneys with care, shining stars hung upon the highest boughs, God and sinners reconciled… Amazon boxes strewn about beneath a tree that will be in a landfill in two weeks and Jeff Bezos laughing at all the money he just made off of all of us fun-loving, sports-watching, middle-class suckers. It’s the hap-happiest season of all!

And what better accompaniment to this growing yuletide spirit than a Christmas Day game featuring your Dallas Mavericks against their 2024 Western Conference Finals opponent, the Minnesota Timberwolves? If I was sitting on Santa’s lap right now, frowning and rigid from the unpleasantness of the situation, I would yet turn my furrowed and sweating brow upward and make my due demand as compensation for my ongoing participation in this charade: I want a trouncing, Fat Man! A Trouncing!

That said, let us now turn our attention towards the upcoming holiday matchup and consider the following three things that could affect the outcome of this game.

Turnovers

In the only previous matchup from this season, the Mavs beat Minnesota 120-114 in a game that saw the Wolves turn the ball over 20 times, leading to 25 Dallas points. For a game that was decided by only 6 points, that stat was a big factor in the loss for Minny. According to StatMuse, the Wolves are turning the ball over 16 times per game this season, making them 9^th worst in the league at controlling the ball. The Mavericks, on the other hand, are turning it over just 14.3 times per game, good for 11^th best in the league.

These words “worst” and “best” can be very helpful tools of rhetoric when attempting to make one option seem better than another. The truth is, it’s a very close margin between these two separate, team stat lines, but basketball games are often won by very close margins, and turnovers could once more be a deciding factor in the outcome of Wednesday’s Christmas matchup.

Threes!

Any more in this league, it’s rare to see a final score that finds both opponents stalled-out below the 100-point mark. There are many factors for this uptick in scoring over the more modest numbers of decades past, several things attributing to the change in the style of play. One of the more prominent, obviously, is the volume of three-point attempts going up across 48 minutes of play, and the increase doesn’t seem to be leveling off this season. Getting hot from deep in any given match can quickly propel a team to a lopsided victory, especially if their defense plays slightly better than pedestrian-level.

Just nine days ago, the Mavericks and Warriors set an NBA all-time record at the Chase Center in San Francisco by sinking a combined 48 treys, which is ridiculous. That’s almost 150 points in threes altogether! While an eruption of that type shouldn’t be expected, it could very well be the case, however, that Luka and Co. feel like putting on a Christmas Spectacular from deep. The only question is, will anyone from Minnesota be feeling the same way? Which leads us to the third and final spirit, I mean factor…

Anthony Edwards

In their previous matchup this season, Anthony Edwards shot 7-13 from three alongside an otherwise 60% field goal percentage, dropping 37 total for the game. Whether or not he’s hit his stride for the season yet, he always presents a potentially deadly threat to take a game over. The momentum that he creates with highlight-reel dunks and deep 3’s can quelch the remaining life out of a struggling defense, opening the gates up for an outright runaway. While the Dallas defense is currently playing well, it’s important to respect an elite scorer. I expect P.J. to handle the brunt of this assignment. Can’t really ask for a better strategy than that, unless another option is exacting retaliatory extortion against one Kristopher Kringle after falling off of his “good list” these last five and twenty years…

How to watch

This one’s ABC! So if you’re in Dallas, WFAA. If you’re anywhere else, check your ABC affiliate. Let’s go Mavs!