Mavs 108, Rockets 133

[burekemde]

Are we completely giving up on the idea of KP/DFS? 

I think that if the Luka/Richardson/THJ/DFS/KP lineup can't work, at least situationally, the roster construction is in a lot of trouble. When a team's 5 best players can't play together, that team hasn't constructed their roster correctly, imo. Some will count Kleber ahead of DFS, which is fine, but the point still stands. Even your top 6 need to be a group who can exist together easily on the court in any combination, imo. 

Again, I don't care who starts, but when it comes to FINISHING close games, I'm going to be disappointed if five out of the 6 above aren't consistently on the floor and on the same page.

Against the very best teams, that almost all have great big wings, we cant have Jrich and THJ same lineup. Its for this fact I argued beginning of this season that we wont see both of them on the same lineup, and that quickly happened after some games THJ was benched. The lineup that played most last season is DFS on the wing. He is our best player defending the biggest best wings, and our best option for this.

DFS gets bullied by bigs inside. He is a wing player. Its cool to change this up according to situations, for instance when opponents dont have a big wing, or only one big in their lineup.

But when we come down to important games, we will meet a big great wing, and two bigs. They would all destroy both JRich and THJ.

Luka-Jrich-DFS-Maxi-KP

Its our 5 best defenders. Its our 5 best two way players. This is our best team.

THJ is a bad defender. He is not among our 5 best players. Maxi is a better player than THJ and he is even shooting better than THJ right now. Not to say how much he is better defender.

I think people underestimate how great Mavs will be when we have 5 two-way players in same lineup. It has termendous effect on Luka. In the games where we had the best defense, when Jrich and Maxi played and DFS, Lukas defense was on another level than it is now.

Having bad defenders is like a virus, it impacts other teammates and they play less D because of this. Lukas defense is not the same now as when our best defenders were in the team. There is a clear correlation here.

Me personally, I really look forward to see Luka-JRich-DFS-Maxi-KP. I think this might become the best defense in the NBA and with Luka and KP we will have a great offense. We saw this lineup (sans KP with WCS in) and they dominated on defense even without KP. Even with the horrible team we had yesterday, we managed decent offensive production. Defense was horrible with Green, THJ, etc in there.

THJ is the perfect 6th man. He is also the 6th best player. Brunson comes 7th IMO.

When this lineup is back, we can look forward I think.