25 games into the season, the Dallas Mavericks’ new experiment was off to a shaky start. After two consecutive playoff losses to the Clippers (in spite of Luka Doncic’s best efforts), Dallas canned general manager Donnie Nelson and head coach Rick Carlisle followed him out the door. They also shipped out Josh Richardson, the guard brought in just one year earlier to offset the defensive load on their budding MVP candidate in the backcourt.
Now, the Mavericks were 12-13. Luka’s shooting percentages were down amid reports that he’d entered the season out of shape, and was about to miss quite a few games due to a nagging ankle injury and COVID-19 protocols. The rest of the team wasn’t looking much better, and the many critics of new head coaching hire Jason Kidd had been thus far vindicated.
However, while the results out of Dallas weren’t pretty, the process had been sound. ShotQuality’s expected record for Dallas through 25 games, calculated by summing individual win probabilities for each game based on the quality of shots taken by each team, was 18-7 — a far cry from 12-13, and a record that would place the Mavericks in the NBA’s upper echelon.
The chart below shows the Mavericks’ point differential for every game this season, with a trendline roughly representing their average net rating at each point in the season. The clusters of red dots are telling — at the beginning of the year, Dallas hovered around the .500 mark for quite some time before going on an absolute tear to close the season. After falling to 12-13 on Dec. 10, their performance finally caught up to their high-quality shot selection: the Mavericks finished the year on a 40-18 roll.
However, while their actual results are generally noisy and fluctuate, very little changed about Dallas’s process during the season. As the below chart shows, their ShotQuality performances consistently showed that they were an elite team. They experienced just two dips in quality of shots taken throughout the season: one during Luka’s extended period of missed time, and a second smaller dip in shot quality as they adjusted after trading Kristaps Porzingis for Spencer Dinwiddie and Davis Bertans.
All year long, the Mavericks generated quality shots — they finished the season with an offensive shot quality rating of 1.21 expected points per possession, which ranked second in the NBA.
The source of their dominant offense is no secret: it’s the young superstar, who matched the first-half point total of a 1-seed in a closeout Game 7 on his own en route to a blowout victory to seal Dallas’s conference finals berth, who keeps things humming along.
What makes Luka Doncic unique even among superstars is his ability to efficiently create for others at his ridiculously high usage rate. 36.1% of Dallas’s shots this year were either attempted by Luka or attempted off passes from Luka, and those attempts yielded 1.25 expected points on average, a mark that would have led the league. Shots off passes from Luka resulted in a ridiculous 1.28 expected points in the regular season, the best mark on the team.
Since Luka returned to the court against the Jazz in Game 4 of the first round, the Mavericks have generated higher quality looks than any team in the playoffs. Their secret weapon? Doubling down on Luka Doncic touches.
In his 10 playoff games through the first two rounds, Luka has averaged 32.8 expected points per game — a mark that shot up to 34.3 SQ PPG against the vaunted Suns defense. An eye-popping 43.4% of Dallas’s shots since his return are either taken by Doncic or off his passes, and those shots have generated 1.23 expected points per possession, which would have led the league in the regular season (Dallas has scored just 1.12 expected PPP on shots not created by Luka in the playoffs since his return). Critics of heliocentric offense beware, Doncic is a one-man scoring machine.
Against Golden State in the Conference Finals, Doncic will face his third straight defense with a Defensive Player of the Year candidate. He made quick work of rim protector Rudy Gobert and lockdown wing Mikal Bridges in the first two rounds, and now will have to contend with the wily Draymond Green. However, against Luka, a defense is only as strong as its weakest link — as the Mavericks proved by continually attacking Chris Paul on that end in their series against the Suns. Luka will have plenty of targets (Stephen Curry, Jordan Poole) to hunt on offense, and there’s little reason to expect him to slow down against the Warriors.
Dallas won’t be favored against Golden State — they have a championship pedigree and more talent across the board. But the Mavericks have Luka Doncic, who it’s now fair to call the best remaining player in the postseason. He will continue creating good looks for Dallas, as he’s done all year. It’s up to the team to turn those high-quality shots into another improbable playoff upset.