MAVS 107, BULLS 117

[mavsluvr]

Predictable. Better team, better coach, more momentum, playing at home. 

I'm actually not that upset, really. You could tell Chicago expected to pull away early, and that the Mavs' runs in the 1st and 2nd surprised them a bit. 

Honestly, if you would've told me Luka was going to play like that I'd have envisioned it being a much worse game. 

Nobody is shooting well, except for Hardaway (kind of). Luka does not look like Luka yet (I'm betting he will start playing better at some point). 

Porzingis didn't play as well as he did in the last two - way, way, WAY too many forced turnaround bricks for my taste, but he's showing signs of shooting the catch-and-shoot ball better and he's moving well enough. I was a little disappointed in his on-ball defense against Vucevic and his rebounding left much to be desired, but overall it was still a better performance than I expected from him at any point this season. 

7-4 is not a bad place to be, considering how this team is playing right now.

Good observations. 

I was surprised to find after the game that I wasn't all that bummed about the loss itself. I think I had more or less braced myself for it. It was more about the failure to compete, especially in the second half. The Mavs aren't the most talented team around, and they are going to lose against some of the teams that are just better than they are. But I like to see them at least make a game of it. 

I don't think Kidd was just defending Luka for show. Without giving Luka a pass, I agreed with Kidd that this is far from being all on Luka. Just watching some of these other guys clunk up the offense was painful. Missing so many shots, for one thing, but also messing up his drives by being too close, making off-ball moves that actually dragged their defenders into Luka's area, making moves that didn't seem purposeful and resulted in their arguably being positioned worse than before, settling for bad shots, etc. I understand that they are trying new stuff and all, but I really hope their is some end-game in mind for this, and they're not just scrambling around out there with no clue about what they're doing. 

Speaking of bad shots, I think when Luka gets frustrated and the team is behind, he settles for way too many. This has been a characteristic of his since he got here. Last night, he indicated that he realizes that he has talked a lot about improving his shot selection, but hasn't really done much about it, and knows he has to be better. 

We have a little more intel (via Brian Dameris) on some of these big man lineups, including continuing to start Powell. The buzz is that their number one objective for the bigs at this point is not to overtax KP. They hope they don't have to give up games on that account, but they are willing to do so in support of that goal if they have to. They need a big man who can sprint out to the perimeter to defend, and they don't want to impose too much of that on KP for load-management purposes. Out of the remaining big men, with Maxi being out, they deem Powell the least of the evils. Hmm.