The Mavericks Season Opening Thoughts
With the dawn of the new season comes a Thursday piece and many Mavs Thoughts.
It was a short summer, which is what we all want from the Mavericks these days.
129 days is the total offseason from the day the Mavericks finally took their last breaths at TD Garden in Boston in the 2024 NBA Finals. They fell short, and it wasn’t particularly close.
They won the Western Conference and thrilled the city with what this basketball franchise was capable of, but at the same time, they settled for a silver medal in 2023-24.
Close.
The good news was that 2024 was not the year they were planning to try to win it all. No, that window is actually the next two years: 2025 and 2026, as they paired Kyrie Irving with Luka Dončić to try to figure things out for a team that had missed the playoffs and seemed lost in the woods.
I contend that they actually contended a year early, and the results were pretty magnificent. They went from missing the playoffs entirely in 2023 and sitting right on the cut-line in early March to a spot where they won three consecutive playoff series as underdogs. They never had home court in any series and were consistently picked against.
Now, they are a trendy pick to contend at the top of the Western Conference. They have swapped out three of their top eight rotation pieces on a team that has been steadily swapping out pieces non-stop for several years in a row.
They also have something they haven’t had to deal with much around here—expectations. They are now expected to be good and expected to contend. They will be a marquee team in the league, and they no longer have to convince people that they might be good. Now, the NBA odds are expecting them to be very good. That is a different posture, and with it comes the idea that teams will look to measure themselves against this group. The bar has been raised, in other words. Last year was a bonus spin. This year, there is an expectation that this team should be a real player in the springtime. Many of us have been waiting for this day to arrive.
So, since we are here on Opening Day for another Mavericks season, let’s roll through many points of riffing as I go down my quick list of things I am pondering for the 2024-25 Mavericks.
These are My Many Thoughts:
— It is reasonable to suggest that this will be Luka Dončić’s MVP season. By every possible measure, his 6th season was his best yet. He led the league in scoring, nearly averaged a triple-double, was All-NBA 1st team for the 5th straight time, pushed his team to the conference finals for the 2nd time in three years – this time through them, and raised his game, his leadership, his emotional maturity, and his entire package to the very top of the sport. At age 25, he continues to ascend when we thought that impossible, and now there aren’t many steps left to take to become both a champion and the recognized “best player on the planet.” He is squarely in both of those conversations.
This, of course, invites odd criticisms of why he hasn’t “won the big one” because we all have segments to burn, but he is reason No. 1 why everything is possible. And now, he has the roster he needed to check those last boxes.
I also think he is at that crossroads where he realizes all the personal numbers are empty if you don’t conquer. But, he also showed the resolve to understand that moving to achieve is not the same as figuring it out where you are. He wanted to win on his terms—like Giannis or Jokic before him—in his city. We are relieved to know that the new model has replaced the old one (which replaced the oldest one).