Fifteen points might not seem like a whole heck of a lot for a guy who has now been an established role-player on the Mavericks for three seasons. However, if you actually bother to look up his game logs, you would see that fifteen points is the third-highest scoring game of Dorian Finney-Smith’s career. (I will call him DFS from now on because it’s shorter and because it makes his nickname seem like “distributed file system”, which is a cool nickname in a Matrixey kinda way.)
Now that the Mavericks have traded away some of the main competitors for DFS’s minutes (especially Harrison Barnes), we will see if there is an extra level of scoring he can attain or if he’s stuck being this low-volume guy who will never take more than ten shots in a game. The Mavs commentators seem to think that he does have an extra gear he can ramp up to; I’m not so sure, but he did have a nice post move in this video that makes me think he might have some untapped scoring potential that we’re not seeing. Maybe he can go from averaging 8 PPG to 10 PPG and be like a Moe Harkless-level starter on an okay playoff team.
That’s assuming that the Doncic-Porzingis core is a playoff team in the West next season. I’m not so sure about that either.