A Few Thoughts on Mavs 115, Suns 117

[Reunion Mav Old]

Trey Burke was as bad this game as he was good the game before.  I don't understand why Coach would give him the freedom to ignore his teammates and call his own number after just one game with the team.  Letting Luka do what he wants is going to work out most of the time, but the rest of the team needs some structure.  I hope Rick is just feeling things out post restart and will start to do some actual coaching during games soon.

I noticed that too but I was so not surprised. I got enamored early on with Trey last year, but his propensity is to play hero ball at way too many of the wrong times. The first night, he fit into the offense. He took the shot he should have until his late insertion into the game. At that point he played some hero ball though not to bad. 

For Trey to be successful, he needs to use his skills, which appear to be quite good, to play well within the offense. He needs to do what THJ did. That is not impossible by any means. I have some hope for him because the guy can score aggressively and does play some defense for a guy his size. We will see. I suspect he is being coached succinctly as we speak.

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I am resigned to the fact that the Mavs might wind up facing the Clippers and getting their heads kicked in which could actually be a good thing. The Clips are a good measuring stick for any wannabe contender and if/when the Mavs get swept by the Clips they are likely to be more aggressive in the offseason.

The thing I would be concerned ab is the very real possibility Mavs face a team like the Nuggets or Jazz who are good but not quite contender status yet and over-perform, thus telling MBT that they only need to tinker around the edges. I am not into tinkering around the edges, tho I do like our team a lot. Mavs are at least one big move away from contention. If it takes getting embarrassed by the Clippers so be it.

Sounds good, but they never seem to learn their lessons.  They never seem interested in the mad dog type of physical players that they need to get out of their "softness" problem.

I totally disagree with the getting swept part. It is far more important that we win at least one game and compete well in all of our playoff games. It is important that our returning players grow and gaining confidence is important. 

To address the not be satisfied legitimate point, I think it is better that win or lose, we truly learn what weaknesses we need to fix the most. We learn the most in a truly competitive playoff game, win or lose. Some things, internal improvement can only do so much as we all seem to know well. But which area of improvement is truly most needed becomes most apparent in a good, close playoff series. The Clippers, Nuggets etc are all plenty good enough to teach us what we need to know, both in team personnel building and in individual player improvement.