1. This article wasn’t supposed to be about the Dallas Mavericks’ 124-111 victory against the Utah Jazz on Monday, a game that wasn’t supposed to be a win. It was going to include some throwaway sentence in the opening couple paragraphs — you know, like, “although the short-handed Mavericks lost on Monday, it’s easy to overlook that understandable result given what comes later this week” — because of, well, what comes later this week. And while we still must talk about this weekend’s Kyrie Irving deal and the potential moves still to be made, but that has been upstaged, if only for a brief but incredible moment, by what the Mavericks did on Monday.
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Dallas won convincingly in one of the team’s most impressive wins in recent memory. Irving and an injured Luka Dončić aren’t with the team yet — and Markieff Morris, too — while Maxi Kleber and Davis Bertans remains injured. Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith were no longer Mavericks. Tim Hardaway Jr. and Christian Wood, the team’s two scoring leaders in the absence of everyone else, only shot a combined 6-of-23 for 23 points. And yet the Mavericks won thanks to performances throughout the team that propelled them to a feel-good — feel-great? — win right as their season is about to change drastically in a way the team believes could make the best team in the conference.
As my 77 Minutes co-host Austin Ngaruiya texted me afterward: “This was a game for hooting and hollering.” To have this performance come from a game that probably seemed skippable when it started, that sure seems to me like it would’ve been the right approach for any fan of this team.
2. The win included dueling pair of 29-point performances from Josh Green and Jaden Hardy, the two key youngsters who the Mavs prioritized keeping this week. Brooklyn had significant interest in Green, but he feels something close to untouchable right now. He’s a perfect stylistic fit next to Dončić and now Irving, but he’s unlocking more of a skillset that hadn’t even seemed on the horizon when this season started.
Green still has some funky mannerisms when he drives, not usually able to shed his defender in a straight line race to the rim despite clearly being one of the league’s most athletic players. But instead of being a pass-only driver like he was last season or a pray-tosser as a rookie, he’s become better at reconfiguring his driving angle — sometimes spinning, sometimes stepping through, sometimes just knocking defenders out of the way — to create layups in his own manner.
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One of the main concerns about him as a college prospect was how much he struggled shooting at the rim. That’s a fairly reliable indicator used by scouts; it’s often not a skill that improves at the NBA level. But Green hasn’t just gotten better at creating more makable layups, but he’s softened his floaters and runners to turn them into real weapons, as well. This season, he’s shot 83.0 percent within three feet of the rim and 51.4 percent in the 3-to-10 feet range. It’s an incredible development that wasn’t even necessary: He would be a good bench player this season with only the shooting improvements we’ve seen and defensive ability we’ve known. But instead, Green is fast outgrowing the 3-and-D label that we weren’t even sure he’d reach early last season.
Where Green will be unsheathed in a larger role thanks to Finney-Smith’s departure, Hardy probably still has DNPs in his future. This performance won’t be his emergence as an every game rotation player, and it shouldn’t be. But Dallas needed shot creation on Monday without Dončić and Irving available — I’m still getting used to those two names next to each other, too — and Hardy did just that. At basketball’s most basic level, there’s no skill more valuable than creating space away from your defender. Hardy does that effortlessly, sometimes with flair and other times just with determination, constantly speeding past opponents tasked with guarding him.
Hardy’s performance should absolutely earn him more minutes, but it’s worth noting that it might not earn him a larger place in the team’s future plans. It might be that Hardy’s value to the Mavericks, who are decisively entering a win-now phase, is proving his intrigue as a raw youngster with clear scoring gifts. And hey, it could be that he and Dončić finished tied for the 2027 MVP award as teammates. It’s too soon to know, but games like this increase the likelihood that another franchise in another phase would target him. Whatever the case turns out to be, it feels awfully important that the Mavericks ended up him last summer.
3. Irving is expected to meet the team on Tuesday in Los Angeles and play in the team’s matchup against the LA Clippers the following day. Dončić has already been ruled out for that game, but the plan is for him to join the team in California on Wednesday. (That’s also Tim Cato’s plan, if you were curious.) It sets up for a staggered Irving and Irving-and-Dončić debut, which should be fun.
There’s a lot more to dive into about Irving’s fit, the questions he brings to this team now and in the future, and what exactly this partnership will look like. But we’re about to see it, and those topics will be top-of-mind and leading every article of mine for weeks. And it feels inconclusive to try to provide an all-encompassing look at how this team will work when we aren’t even sure this is the team it’ll be by the time Thursday’s deadline ends.
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4. Dallas is indeed actively exploring trade structures involving Wood and Hardaway Jr., the two aforementioned scoring leaders who weren’t exactly convincing on Monday of why they shouldn’t be dealt. Wood remains a complicated polarity of a player. It’s obvious how effectively he scores, clear how much he’s not a defensive anchor, and truly debatable whether he’s a player that ultimately helps teams win in a role that he can accept.
It’s clear the Mavericks believe that he shouldn’t be more than a rotation player — one coming off the bench, as he did on Monday in his return from injury — if he’s going to remain on this team. It’s possible that his six-point performance on 1-of-7 shooting will make the few suitors interested in him hesitant. Of course, no one should overreact to one lousy game after missing two weeks while Wood’s broken left thumb is still healing. But for the Mavericks to play this well while Wood was virtually absent is interesting, to say the least.
I have a lot of leeway for the various arguments made about what Wood’s role should be. It seemed clear early this season he was underused in a way that hurt the team’s chances to win, but that was driven by the struggling role players around Dončić. Wood never would have started at all if the team hadn’t botched the JaVale McGee signing — he had no points or rebounds in seven minutes on Monday — and a bench role might become more obviously his place if he’s still on the roster post-deadline.
It’s tricky, I’ll admit it, because Wood has obviously contributed to a share of the team’s success this season. But they’ve also scored five points per 100 possessions more this season with Dwight Powell on the floor than Wood. That’s a quick-and-dirty stat with some obvious noise baked into it, but Wood’s offense isn’t an imperative part of the team. There really aren’t recent championship teams or even runner-ups who built around a traditional center making $20 million or more, especially not one who wasn’t a defensive anchor. If those are Wood’s demands this summer, then trading him now is justified. It’ll just be a matter to see if they can find any team willing to send something back.
5. As for Hardaway, I’m a little higher on what his role has meant in Dallas — albeit less so with what he has done in that role — than Wood. There’s a startling efficiency gap when Dončić is paired with him and when he isn’t. When Dončić plays with Hardaway, the team scores 124.7 points per 100 possessions, which is a simply unheard-of figure for any offense to have. With Dončić on the floor without Hardaway, that falls to 114.2 points per 100 possessions, which is a bit below league average.
What that statistic means isn’t that Hardaway is fundamentally responsible for Dončić’s success — obviously, it’s not that — but that Dončić does benefit from a movement shooter with volume, something only Hardaway does to this degree on the roster. Whether his absence would cause the numbers to shift that drastically is ridiculous; Dallas could survive him being shipped out, and some of the noisiness that is contributing to those figures being so stark would even out in a larger sample. But if he’s on the team past Thursday, there are some reasons for it no matter how frustrating his play can be at times.
6. What Dallas still needs is another wing defender and, ideally, a backup big that can replicate what McGee was supposed to provide. Another ball handler would still be useful, of course, since Dallas still doesn’t have many of them and the Dončić-and-Irving duo can still be expected to miss games. But it’s the defending that Kleber’s return alone can’t save, and which most imminently needs outside additions. Now we wait to see if the Mavericks can fill those needs. We’ll have our answer before long.
