As I write this, all members of the Mavericks organization (including players) are getting kicked out of their hotel rooms and being forced to board buses that will drive them all the way back to Dallas. Their belongings, no matter in what state they are, packed or unpacked, are being thrown out of those same hotel rooms while they beg and plead for just one or two more hours of blissful COVID-free respite inside the bubble. No such luck; eliminated teams are immediately labeled as undesirables and must be removed from the premises at the soonest possible opportunity.
All things said and done, I would say that this season was a success for the Mavericks. They were right there with the other good-not-great teams in the West (Jazz, Thunder, Rockets) and they took two games off a team that most people view as a championship contender. They found out that their pudgy Slovenian is actually an MVP candidate in disguise. They found out that their lanky Latvian is too injury-prone to be counted on, but also that there are players on the team who can step up when Krispy P is on the bench in a suit with ice packs strapped to every part of his body. They found out that their pint-sized Puerto Rican is still very much alive.
But most importantly, they found out that Dorian Finney-Smith is a high-end role-player who fits in well with Luka and is also way better than Justin Jackson. I assume he is a high-end role-player because Rick Carlisle gave him 30 MPG per game despite his unimpressive statisticals, and Rick Carlisle knows what he’s doing when it comes to minutes allocations. If DFS is getting those minutes, it’s because he’s doing things on the court that don’t show up in the box-score, a fact which makes me mad because the only way I can make sense of the NBA is through box-scores.
FUN FACT: out of the 90-ish players who got 30 MPG per game (DFS was actually at 29.9 but we’re rounding up here), DFS was second-lowest in PPG per game at 9.5. Only P.J. Tucker was lower at 6.9 PPG per game. That just illustrates how much apparent value DFS has, to be given such a large role despite being a Tony Snell-type scorer. The Mavericks are keeping him around on a cheap deal so that probably means at least one championship in the next three seasons that deal is active.