DALLAS — The Dallas Mavericks needed Dereck Lively II, and Jason Kidd knew it. But first, he knew Lively needed a moment to breathe.
With just under six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter of Saturday’s Game 3, the Oklahoma City Thunder had resorted to hack-a-Shaq tactics. For two consecutive possessions, the league’s third-best defense in the regular season intentionally sent Lively, a 50 percent free-throw shooter, to the foul line. He split the first pair, then missed them both on his second trip. Shortly after, Kidd pulled Lively to the bench. It was a break that lasted 52 seconds.
“I wanted him to just have a chance to catch his breath,” the Mavericks’ coach said. “We have confidence in that young man that he’s going to do the right thing. That’s how he’s been all season, and it’s how we’ve been with him.”
Before Lively’s second trip to the line, he had sprinted the baseline to temporarily avoid Chet Holmgren’s foul. The 20-year-old Lively, who looked in that moment like he was playing tag, is closer in age to those familiar childhood games than anyone else on the court. It took the 32-year-old Kyrie Irving, established throughout this season as the team’s emotional leader, to tell him that wasn’t necessary.
“You don’t have to do all that,” Irving said, recalling what he told him. “Let them foul you, accept it, take it as a compliment, and go out there and hit your free throws. We believe in you.”
GO DEEPER
Saturday’s NBA playoff takeaways
When Lively reentered, Oklahoma City tried its deck-a-Dereck strategy twice more. Lively hit all four free throws. The Thunder, who had trailed by 4 points when they began intentionally fouling him, lost 105-101. It was the same margin, the same result. Dallas now leads the series 2-1.
Neither Lively nor his free throws were the reason Dallas won. Rather, it was the entire team, Lively included, that created yet another unique winning blueprint against the Thunder to take the series lead.
“We’re not built on one guy,” Kidd said. “We’re built on a team.”
For many years, Dallas’ strategy has relied excessively on Luka Dončić. Hard not to, honestly, when he is that good. But the Dončić of the past few weeks has been hobbled by a right knee sprain among other lingering ailments.
“I’m battling out there,” Dončić acknowledged afterward. “It’s a little bit more time (before Game 4). I need the rest — all the rest I can get.”
Dončić scored 22 points Saturday, tied for the fourth-fewest points in his playoffs career, two of which have come this postseason. He’s still not right, not nearly the player who just earned a third-place finish in the league’s MVP voting announced this week. Dončić has said his knee won’t be right until he rests it this summer. He knows it’s what he has to deal with. But it’s inconceivable that the Mavericks could have won games like this in past postseasons without Dončić at his best.
On Saturday, they did.
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Lively contributed to the win. “We want to protect him,” Irving said. “We understand he’s 20 years old, and we’re asking him to do a lot of things out there defensively.” In Saturday’s contest, Dallas often asked him to switch onto the Thunder’s best offensive players. It wasn’t something Dallas put on him often during the regular season, preferring more passive pick-and-roll coverages that kept him near the rim. But Oklahoma City plays almost constant five-out basketball, one that requires Dallas’ centers to either concede pick-and-pop jumpers to contain the ballhandler or switch onto those players outright, which Lively sometimes did.
“It’s not easy to (switch) onto an MVP candidate (like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) or (Jalen) Williams,” Kidd said. “Normally in this league when you’re 7 feet and you’re (guarding) someone like Shai, they’ve got the advantage, but he’s done a pretty good job keeping him in front.”
P.J. Washington contributed, too. After 29 points in Dallas’ Game 2 win, Washington followed up one of his career-best performances with 27 more points. Like Lively, he responded to the Thunder’s strategy by altering what his game usually represents. Because Oklahoma City has chosen to deny Dallas’ favored pick-and-rolls by having its help defenders sag into the paint, Washington has frequently been left open this series. Against some Dallas players, that’s all right. This team traded spacing for defense at the trade deadline. But Washington is an offensive talent, albeit an inconsistent one, unlike others on the Dallas roster. Following his 7-of-11 shooting performance from 3 on Thursday, Washington attempted 12 more 3s in Saturday’s win. He wasn’t quite as accurate, hitting five, but not once in his NBA career had he taken that many shots behind the arc. Not until Saturday, anyway.
It’s a departure from the oft-dogmatic approach of the Dončić era, one in which it only made sense for him to demand control of the game given his teammates. Ones who couldn’t defend, ones who needed him. But where Dončić was not his scoring self in Saturday’s game, his teammates picked him up. And where they needed the same from him, Dončić picked them up on the other end. He didn’t quite reach the defensive acme we witnessed last series, specifically what he provided in Game 2 before his knee injury, but he fought on every possession. No play might have been more decisive than his steal and the layup he converted seconds later with 2:15 remaining in the game.
Lively, Washington, Dončić, Irving. Those are the players mentioned so far, perhaps ones who contributed more than others. But Derrick Jones Jr.’s defense against Gilgeous-Alexander has stood out in every matchup. Daniel Gafford, the starting center, adjusted his offensive approach to include more patience, which resulted in 8 points on five shots despite Lively making more sense down the stretch. Tim Hardaway Jr. hit three necessary shots in a game in which Dallas barely scored 110 points per 100 possessions, nearly 6 points below the team’s season average. Josh Green provided necessary tempo, and even Dante Exum added ball movement despite his struggles to make shots.
Dallas has become not a roster built around its superstar but a team. One that can cover up shortcomings from its best players, one that can provide the baseline defensive margin even when the shots aren’t falling in the same manner. In Game 3, Dallas had nine more offensive rebounds and 10 more total attempts than Oklahoma City. The team’s size and the Thunder’s well-known rebounding struggles created another way for Dallas to beat them and surge ahead in the series. Oklahoma City does have more adjustments, something that’s still true. But more importantly, Dallas is the team forcing them to happen, rather than the other way around.
GO DEEPER
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Dončić, still this team’s on-court leader, wants more than anything to win basketball games. Whatever physical limitations and box-score shortcomings he has in this series, he has positively affected Dallas’ results in the past two games.
“He used his voice very well tonight,” Irving said. “You could tell he wanted to win, and that’s all we need from Luka. For us, it’s just continuing to feed him that energy that he can trust who he’s around and he can trust that when the ball leaves his hands, other good things are going to happen. … No matter if he scores a lot or not, our team is going to win.”
Because the Dallas Mavericks, for perhaps the first time in the Dončić era, are not a roster led by him but a team.
“It’s just not on Luka,” Irving said. “It’s on all of us.”
(Photo of P.J. Washington: Logan Riely / NBAE via Getty Images)
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