Back in October, I wrote about something I figured would quietly become one of the more important story lines in the league: How would the Mavericks—who opted to let highly talented guard Jalen Brunson walk—handle Luka Dončić’s usage rate, which had already been the NBA’s highest in each of the past two seasons?
Dallas was coming off a Western Conference finals appearance—albeit one it lost to eventual champion Golden State in a gentleman’s sweep—meaning, in theory, a couple of precise roster tweaks should have been enough to land the team back in title contention behind Dončić’s on-court leadership.
Instead, the offseason and early-season tweaks were mild and made very little difference. Free-agent pickup JaVale McGee has been out of the rotation for the past month since Maxi Kleber returned. Christian Wood’s 19 minutes per game in February and just 23.4 in March are fewer than coach Jason Kidd has given the big man all year, despite Wood enjoying his best true-shooting percentage month of the season. Dallas’s biggest move—the swing-for-the-fences one—involved shipping out Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith for All-Star guard Kyrie Irving just before the trade deadline, and … it simply hasn’t worked.
