2 thoughts from the Mavericks’ 122-111 defeat to the Grizzlies

There’s only so much left to write about the Dallas Mavericks’ quiet spiral into the dark night. It’s over. Every new defeat does nothing but double down on that diagnosis. Even ones like Friday’s, a competitive 122-111 defeat to the Memphis Grizzlies, featuring hard-fought play from what was almost a seven-man rotation, aren’t inspiring too much more than the obvious.

Dallas is a .500 team for the first time since November, for just the second time since this late into the season since the 2018-19 campaign, one which we all know was Luka Dončić’s rookie arrival. Since he came here, excluding what had previous been the team’s high-water catastrophe two seasons ago, Dallas has only enjoyed success. Obviously, the Dončić trade alone did not cause this; no team would be ascendent with four of its five preferred starters out. But even that calamitous year in 2023, the one where Dallas was left out of the postseason entirely, was not this bad so soon. On March 7 of that year, the team had a 34-32 record. It took one more week until that happened, another one until Dallas slipped into a losing record for good.

As things stand right now, with the Mavericks sitting at 32-32, it’s hard to imagine this team salvaging this season with more than a few more wins any longer.

We can’t be this bleak the rest of the season. That’s my bad. I’ll adjust. It was nice to see Caleb Martin’s debut, a trade that I mildly defended in the moment, at least within the logical line stemming from the Dončić trade, no matter how much I disagreed with that. Martin defended fairly well against Ja Morant, often Dallas’ best player for the first three quarters, although Morant certainly clinched this game with seven straight points late in the fourth.

But Dallas’ best two players were Naji Marshall and especially Brandon Williams, the two-way-contracted guard with nine games remaining before his two-way eligibility runs out. (Kessler Edwards, meanwhile, has just seven more games he can be active for after Friday’s matchup.) Williams, dare I say it, sometimes looks a bit like Kyrie Irving. I think his full-body load-up for his 3-pointers and wrist flick look exactly like him. The interior wizardry, of course, can’t fully compare. But Williams has something, and it sure might be in Dallas given next season’s looming situation without Irving for much of it. The more he proves in the coming weeks, the likelier it is Dallas would see him as a deserving candidate to earn a real contract late this season and perhaps for the next one, too.

Marshall, meanwhile, set his NBA career high with 29 points on 10-of-23 shooting along with 17 rebounds, another career high. It was a quantity performance, sure, but one that Dallas needed given the lack of other options. It’s not like anyone else on the team was efficient. Only Williams, who shot 10-of-15, finished above 50 percent shooting while taking at least one shot. Marshall also clarified this was not his lifetime high: He once scored 54 points in a high school basketball game against PG County, famously known for being where Kevin Durant grew up.

It’s the small, little moments like this that matter from now until the season’s end.