MAVS NEWS:

[omahen]

With the Blazers loss last night, the Mavs are now your #10 seed in the West.  With some winnable games coming up, they may move up more.   Looking below them, the Trailblazers should be better.   Losing hope in LAC figuring it out.  After that it gets brutal finding who is going to win games.   

Tonights game may be interesting.  Dallas has played well.   They have beat teams mostly missing a core player.  Also, when you are bad you always have to wonder if you got the best from the other team.  Sometimes they think just by showing up they can win.   Although, it will be interesting to see if they blow the doors off against a team they are better than.  Sometimes that tells you a lot as well.

Portland is somehow quietly falling apart. They had a very nice October start of the season, but are just 5-14 in November and December.  They were supposed to be a good defensive team, but the lowly NO scored 143 points against them last night. Even this was not a consequence of some extremely hot shooting. I didn't watch the game but box score suggests NO was doing whatever they wanted. 

Portland has some interesting young players in Avdija, Sharpe, Camara and Clingan. Henderson tbd. But they also have several vets and if their result free fall continues, they might think about becoming sellers. Jrue and Grant are on bloated 3 year deals that will be difficult to move, even though both could be interesting to some contenders. Williams and Thybulle are expiring - contenders could again be interested, but they are unlikely to fetch more than a SRP or so.