Dallas’ season is make-or-break on how well their bully-ball lineups succeed
For the most part, the Mavericks offseason is over. Daniel Gafford just signed his extension, Dallas added D’Angelo Russell with the midlevel exception available to them from Kyrie Irving’s new contract, and the only loose ends are end of the bench churn to free up space for Dante Exum to come back.
There are rumors and rumblings of larger moves (because there always is) but for now we just have to talk about the Mavericks roster that’s in front of us. And by far the biggest question facing this Mavericks team is simply: can Anthony Davis at the four work in 2025?
It’s an identity the Mavericks front office have basically sold their souls for, with the trading of Luka Doncic for Davis in February. Dallas is putting everything on the line for a big, bully-ball identity as the league keeps getting faster and more spread out. The Mavericks now have two starting-level centers (Dereck Lively, Daniel Gafford), three starting level power forwards (Davis, PJ Washington, Cooper Flagg), and one of those power forwards spends a decent amount of time at center (Davis). Washington and Flagg will have to shift down to the three and two if Davis mostly plays the four, and Lively and Gafford’s minutes are in flux with Davis presumably getting some burn as a five as well.
Dallas has plenty of logic for all of this: Davis and Lively are injury prone, so the more bodies the better. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison infamously believes “defense wins championships” and there’s no denying the Mavericks at full health (or even half health) can toss out three or four elite defenders on the floor at one time. There wasn’t a lot of data last season with all the injuries, there were glimpses of Davis at the four bully-ball lineup really showing something.
This is all well and good, but the roster is complicated. There’s been a lot of discussion amongst the fan base around it, and I figured now is as good a time as ever to have an earnest conversation about it. Can it work? How would it work? What are the drawbacks? Let’s dig in.
Spacing not guaranteed
The biggest hurdle to get over for Dallas with Davis at the four is the team’s spacing. The modern NBA demands good three point shooting, and lots of it – go look at the eight playoff teams from each conference in the last 10 years and you can almost line them up in a similar order based on their total made threes and three point percentage. Bad three point shooting teams rarely make the playoffs nowadays, and when they do, they don’t last long.
So how do the Mavericks get around that with Davis? First things first: Davis is not a good jump shooter, and everyone has to stop pretending this isn’t the case. For his career Davis is a 29.6 percent three point shooter, and his career-high was 34 percent on 2.2 attempts per game way back in 2018. The last time he was at or above 30 percent was 2020. That was five years ago.
Davis isn’t a three point threat, which admittedly isn’t much of a hot take. But what about jump shots that aren’t threes? That’s the biggest issue with Davis at the four: he also isn’t a good midrange shooter.
For five of the last seven seasons, Davis has been below 40 percent from midrange. Typically, a livable number for midrange percentage is around 41 or 42 percent, with the elite members of that range floating above 45 and even closer to 50. Davis actually hit 42.5 percent of his midrange shots last season, far and away his best mark in years. Of course Davis only played nine games in Dallas with two play-in games, so the sample is hardly anything to bank on. Before the trade to Dallas, Davis was often floating around 35 percent from midrange, which is just not good.
It’s especially not good when you consider how dominant Davis is around the basket and in the paint, outside of the restricted area. There actually are spots on the floor where a Davis jump shot makes sense – those short looks near the elbow or just inside it, facing up from the short corner, attacking from the mid-post and pulling up just inside the foul line. Davis can fairly consistently make those types of short jumpers, but when he’s at the four and playing next to a non-shooting five, it means Davis just starts every possession a bit farther from the rim than he probably should, which creeps up the shot distance average.
Offensively, Davis at the four could make a lot more sense if he had a floor-spacing center next to him like Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis, Myles Turner, or Brook Lopez. Davis is still elite when facing up and using his size and quickness to attack from 15 feet out. It’s just when there’s a center in the dunker’s spot always dragging in an extra help defender, there’s less room for Davis closer to the rim. Which in turn leads to longer, missed two pointers.
Considering neither Gafford nor Lively will become spot-up three point shooting threats in the next six months, what can the Mavericks do then? They didn’t have a lot of time last season due to injuries, but simply put, they need to experiment and get weird as hell.
Dallas’ presumed starting lineup as of now will be Russell, Flagg, Washington, Davis, and either Lively or Gafford. Unless coach Jason Kidd does something unexpected, Klay Thompson, by far the team’s best floor-spacer, will be coming off the bench. Kidd will need to get fluid with his lineup combinations, but also how the team actually plays. If Davis is sharing the floor with another big for 60 percent or so of his minutes next season, they’ll have to squeeze blood from a stone so to speak to find offense. Davis thankfully has some tools to exploit that.
The biggest one is his passing. Davis averaged 4.4 assists per game with Dallas, and has shown to be a pretty decent passer throughout his career. He isn’t an offensive fulcrum in this way, and you’re not going to give Davis the ball on clear outs and expect him to just generate offense out of thin air and set up his teammates, but put Davis in advantageous positions and he will make the right play to the right teammate. While most NBA teams don’t spam much of anything during the regular season, keeping things mostly vanilla due to the long schedule and lack of practice time, Kidd needs to spam Davis as the ball handler in the pick and roll, and run some big-big, high-low actions. We saw it a handful of times last season, and Davis has already developed some great chemistry with Gafford in the pick and roll.
Granted this is an extremely small sample, but when Davis and Gafford shared the floor last season the Mavericks scored 125.3 points per 100 possessions according to Cleaning the Glass. Again, this was in only 83 possessions, so not even a full game’s worth, but it is promising. Lively will have to grow up a bit in this regard, Gafford is simply a better offensive player than him at this moment. Thankfully Lively has shown some signs that he can do more than just finish alley-oops and dunks, and he’ll need that to get creative with Davis feeding him. Dallas just doesn’t have enough shooting to generate the easy lobs Lively and Gafford were used to, but with Davis as the ballhandler the Mavericks can throw some teams off with mismatches and exploit that. Davis’ height also gives him an advantage in throwing clearer lobs too. There’s some room to experiment here if Kidd pushes this group.
The possibilities could get fun and funky. What about Davis as the ball handler with Flagg as the roll man? What if you swapped those two? Dallas might not have enough shooting to be a reasonable championship contender, but they have enough size and athleticism to figure out different ways to get easier points. That’s not to say it will always come easy, but there are ways to engineer this so it doesn’t look ugly all the time. Heed this though: there will be nights Dallas sets the league back with how their offense looks, and frankly their utter lack of three point shooting will doom them in certain matchups, no matter how many pick and roll combinations Kidd rolls out.
A give-and-take defense
The main selling point of Davis with another center is defense. Davis is an all-world level defender, and while Gafford’s defense probably isn’t up to snuff, he is an elite rim-protector when he gets there. Lively looked special in his rookie season, and carried some of that over as well. When the Mavericks were previously built around Doncic and Kyrie Irving, there was a question about whether you could win a title when your two best players don’t max out as elite defenders. That isn’t a question you can ask of this Dallas roster, at least.
With Flagg, Washington, Davis, and Lively, the Mavericks have tons of defensive potential. Those are four super athletes that can use their length and athleticism to wall off the paint. It’s not trivial to say Dallas will almost always be the biggest team on the floor when they matchup with their opponent, and that size can fuel Dallas’ defensive philosophy recently under Kidd – take away the rim, live and die by threes. Dallas has been one of the better rim defending teams since Lively’s arrival and the Gafford trade, and adding Davis and Flagg turbocharges that philosophy. The thinking is a layup or dunk is the best shot in basketball, so if the Mavericks snuff that out from opposing teams, there is a trickle down effect, forcing teams to rely on the more unreliable jump shot, whether a midranger or even a three pointer. We’ve seen Dallas get burned by this before with a team that can stretch the floor and bomb away, but playing the odds, taking away a teams’ ability to get layups and dunks is just generally going to work out in your favor over the long run. Davis at the four only enhances this proposition.
There’s just one problem: last season, the Mavericks were an awful paint-defending team with Davis. When Davis returned in late March, the Mavericks were bottom three in points in the paint allowed per game, and in matchups against good teams with winning records, the Mavericks allowed a layup line – look at the 80 points in the paint surrendered in a loss to the Clippers on April 5, or the play-in tournament loss to the Grizzlies that saw the Mavericks allow 60 points in the paint. Both of those games featured Davis, Lively, and Washington, with the Memphis game featuring those three and Gafford. Dallas’ size is nice, but good teams with spacing and driving can stretch Dallas’ bigs away from the rim, and then dice them up in the paint. With Davis at the four, he’ll have to cover more ground and be away from the paint more as teams continue to size down and spread the floor with their power forward. Davis is a remarkable defensive anchor, but at his age you simply do not want him consistently closing out to shooters at the three point line, which he’ll have to do at the four.
The bright side is in the limited minutes Davis and Lively shared the floor together, they were dominant – a 101.7 defensive rating in 116 possessions according to Cleaning the Glass. But again, the numbers don’t tell the full story – Dallas got blasted in the paint against winning teams, and in the 11 total games Davis played after returning from injury, only three of those games were against winning teams and the Mavericks lost all three of those games by double-digits.
Remember that great offensive number with Gafford and Davis? Well on defense, that lineup bleed points, giving up 123 points per 100 possessions. Gafford historically is great at defending shots when he’s there at the rim, but the problem is he isn’t consistently there, and teams can rack up easy points attacking Gafford in space or exposing him on switches. Gafford struggled defensively last season without the Mavericks having an ace point-of-attack defender (remember Derrick Jones Jr.?) and the Mavericks have only doubled-down on that approach. Who is guarding point guards on opening night? Russell? Yikes. If Exum returns that will help, but he can only play so much. Dallas will likely sick Washington and Flagg on dominant lead ball handlers if the team feels it can “hide” Russell on a less threatening spot-up wing, but we’ll see how those two can hold up over the season.
You can chalk up some of the miscues to injuries and timing, with Davis not only learning a new scheme with new teammates, but barely being on the floor to pick up any chemistry. It didn’t help either that even when Davis returned, he was clearly not 100 percent, and asking Davis to move and close out on the perimeter was just a recipe for disaster against teams equipped to punish the mismatch.
A healthier Davis and Lively is a must for this defense to reach its full potential, and much like the offense, there will be nights where it looks dominant, and then nights where it looks helpless. This Mavericks defense will positively maul mediocre and bad offenses, but against teams that can rip it from deep and play five or even four-out basketball, the Mavericks might struggle to keep up.
2020 was 5 years ago
Before I wrap this up, I wanted to note a talking point that’s come around with Davis since being traded to Dallas. A big rebuttal from folks that seem to truly believe Davis at the four can work in today’s NBA is to look at Davis’ lone championship from 2020 with the Lakers. That season Davis started mostly at the four next to a center platoon of JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard.
Davis did in fact play 60 percent of his regular season minutes at the four in 2020. And yes, those minutes were good – according to Cleaning the Glass, the Lakers lineups with Davis at the four in 2020 had a 5.3 net rating, compared to a 5.4 net rating for groups with Davis at center. So basically a wash, and both positive.
In the playoffs, it was a different story, as Davis played 60 percent of his minutes at center, and the Davis at center lineups in the 2020 playoffs had a monstrous 15.3 net rating according to Cleaning the Glass. To be fair, the Davis at the four lineups were still positive in the playoffs (8.3 net rating), but it was obvious to everyone watching the Lakers really dominated teams with Davis in the five during their bubble playoff run.
The problem is 2020 is now somewhat a long time ago by NBA standards. Davis is 32-years-old and will turn 33 before next season ends. He’s endured numerous injuries both to his lower and upper body since then. And in the seasons that followed the Lakers title, their defense hasn’t been as good as its needed to be to remain a contender. Not all of that is on Davis, mind you, as the Lakers front office made puzzling decisions in the wake of the championship – but it’s clear at least right now that Davis is not a plug-and-play defender that can turn any roster into an elite defending unit. To be fair, there aren’t that many players of that ilk around, and Davis will have the most defensive talent around him since that 2020 team. The pieces are there, but clinging to an example that is now five years old isn’t helpful. The NBA keeps evolving and adapting.
At the end of the day, if I made the decisions, I’m not sure I would go all-in on a roster featuring Davis playing extended minutes at the four in 2025. There are ways that can work, but the amount of qualifiers the Mavericks need to hit feels immense (If Davis is healthy, if Lively is healthy, if Davis can make jumpers, if Flagg is better than advertised, if Lively can get better on switches, if Washington can keep nailing threes…). But I do appreciate a team that is trying to zig while the league zags. Dallas is a deeply talented but deeply weird team. There simply isn’t another roster remotely similar to the Mavericks right now. They are undoubtedly unique, and they are undoubtedly talented. There will be nights this Mavericks team beats the living hell out of certain squads and looks unmatched. They will go on an East Coast road trip and play a string of games against Washington, Miami, Charlotte, Chicago and they will bludgeon those types of teams to death. It will inspire talk-show segments and First Take clips declaring Nico Harrison is a genius. They will win seven out of nine and every final score will look something like 108-92. There will be podcasts and think pieces wondering if the Mavericks have found a new slant, if they’ve started a new era of the NBA and if teams need to tear down their rosters and model them after Dallas’ bully ball. It will admittedly be very fun to watch.
But there will be games against the cream of the crop, against teams that play five shooters at a time, with a floor spacing center. The Mavericks will shoot 28 percent from three for a week or so, lose five out of six, and every person praising the team for the genius of building a throwback roster will instead crow about how the team is doomed to fail. I can’t say for certain whether this experiment the Mavericks are trying is going to work, but it will definitely be interesting and I’m fascinated to see how Kidd and this coaching staff puts the pieces into place.