The Dallas Mavericks were humbled by the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday night, falling in Game 1 of their series 117-95. Following the loss, Josh Bowe and I recorded a show on YouTube and for podcast platforms where we try to make sense of the 22-point loss.
We open with a discussion on the main element of the loss, the thing that really baffled our basketball sensibilities. Josh and I both agree that the main issues with the Dallas Mavericks start on the offensive end, where Dallas has gone utterly stagnant in the playoffs. Now, much of that can be traced back to Luka Doncic’s knee injury, which waffles between being serious and something he has to deal with, depending on the game. He fell in this game on a close-out and never looked quite right after getting up. But it goes deeper than that for sure.
After that, we walk through how the Mavericks lost in sequence. This wasn’t a fun game to watch, between the mixed refereeing then Dallas getting bombarded off the floor with three pointers. Jason Kidd opted to play Tim Hardaway a lot, Luka Doncic was awful, and we explain that Kyrie very clearly doesn’t want to run more of the offense, or he’d be doing so already. This was not a fun show because this was not a fun game. That said, we are glad to get to talk about basketball with fans.