Dallas Mavericks<\/a> season. They\u2019re probably going to lose a lot of those games, so you\u2019re not watching for the thrill of victory. A lot of the players on the team right now will likely be gone after this summer, so you\u2019re not seeing the beginning of some blossoming young team.<\/p>\nI\u2019m going to watch at least half those games, if not more. Why?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same when the team is good, too, even when they\u2019re great. Take a moment and think about all the great teams who didn\u2019t win a championship, and then broke apart within five years. If you\u2019re a Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs fan, you\u2019ve seen four championships in the last 25 years. That means 21 years of disappointment for fans of the most successful teams. For fans of less successful teams\u2026well, it\u2019s a lot of disappointment.<\/p>\n
But we keep coming back. We watch championship teams, mediocre teams, lottery teams. Mostly it ends badly, sometimes even heartbreak. So why do we do this?<\/p>\n
One easy answer is to see Cooper Flagg\u2019s development. It looks like he\u2019s going to be a superstar, and it\u2019s always fun to be there for the beginning of something like that.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also the other young guys, Max Christie and Ryan Nembhard. They\u2019ll likely be role players at best, but it\u2019s fun to get to know players like that and see if they become more.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the chance that Jason Kidd will awake from his slumber and show a human emotion once or twice during a game. Maybe he\u2019ll even raise his voice and get ejected, just for fun or sheer boredom.<\/p>\n
If Dwight Powell gets enough minutes, he might break the career record for getting hit in the face with a basketball. Or he might break a real Mavericks franchise record simply by being around for a while (he\u2019s less than thirty rebounds away from passing Erick Dampier for eighth all time).<\/p>\n
Maybe you\u2019re in full tank mode and are rooting for them to lose every game for the rest of the season so they get a better pick. That\u2019s one way to stay entertained! Make sure you\u2019re staying up to date on all the mock drafts.<\/p>\n
You might just like seeing Klay Thompson shoot 3-pointers. He likely won\u2019t pass any more historical marks this season, but he\u2019s got a great shot, and it\u2019s fun to see him when he\u2019s shooting the lights out. Maybe Thompson has a game where he goes on an absolute heater and hits double digit 3-pointers.<\/p>\n
Maybe around mid-March the players will just be sick of this season and get in a fight with another team. It\u2019s not what you\u2019re watching for, obviously, but it would break up the monotony of one of the weirdest and blandest seasons in years.<\/p>\n
Maybe the best reason to be here, watching these games, caring about what\u2019s going on, is the relationships you build through this dumb team. It creates bonds with your parents, your kids, your brothers and sisters, your friends, that will likely never go away. It\u2019s why we get so happy when this team succeeds, and why we get so despondent when a historically incompetent GM trades away a top five player for almost no return.<\/p>\n
So we keep showing up to see them lose by twenty to a championship contender, or lose by two to a fellow lottery-bound team. We watch the good games and the bad, even if we turn it off and go to bed early sometimes (especially those West Coast games with late start times).<\/p>\n
Maybe there\u2019s no real legitimate reason to watch a soon-to-be deconstructed team finish out a miserable season, and we\u2019re all some sort of addicts. Addicted to basketball, whether it\u2019s in it\u2019s best or worst forms. If you stop and think about it too long, it really doesn\u2019t make sense. We\u2019re going to watch this team finish out 2-10, together, for fun?<\/p>\n
But here we are, getting excited about Flagg making a play way too advanced for someone his age, or getting mad about Daniel Gafford\u2019s lack of rebounding, or just getting bored. But we\u2019re in it together, in this basketball purgatory together, thinking about better days on the horizon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What\u2019s the point of all this? Not just the last 12 games of this Dallas Mavericks season. They\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,40012],"class_list":{"0":"post-215389","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-headlines","10":"tag-dallas-news","11":"tag-mavericks-features"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}