Dallas is set to host the West-leading Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday, their final home game before playing eight of their next nine games on the road.<\/p>\n
OKC is fresh off a hard-fought OT victory against conference foes Denver, while Dallas is coming off an equally crucial matchup against Memphis, and it\u2019s safe to say both teams were pretty happy with the outcomes of their last games.<\/p>\n
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This matchup should prove to be a much easier walk for both teams to get where they\u2019d like to go, as Oklahoma has defeated Dallas twice already this season, the last victory coming in the form of a 21-point drubbing back in early December. Though with Dallas owning the Thunder\u2019s first this season (currently the 29th pick as Detroit has the league\u2019s best winning percentage), Thunder losses should also be of interest to Mavs fans with an eye towards the future<\/p>\n
Flaggless in Dallas<\/p>\n
Even in a season where the goal isn\u2019t to compete for a championship, or even a postseason birth for that matter, when you have a player like Cooper Flagg put together a historic rookie performance, there\u2019s still reason for engaged viewing. It\u2019s unlikely that Flagg, who\u2019s been out of action since the All Star break with a foot injury, will return to the floor quite yet. He\u2019s officially a game-time decision as of this writing.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all well and good, but for fans\u2019 sake, hopefully at least some of the younger core will be back in action after nearly all of them were out for the Memphis game. With no Flagg and Derek Lively out for the season, the only young guys Mavs fans have to watch in hopes of future development are the recently re-signed Ryan Nembhard and perhaps Marvin Bagley, should the Org see fit to keep him around after this season.<\/p>\n
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A perfect storm<\/p>\n
For a team like Oklahoma City, going 6-and-4 over their last 10 games is a bout as close to a \u201cslump\u201d as you\u2019re going to get. Comparing the team\u2019s performance in wins and losses over those games, it\u2019s actually remarkable how little difference there is in how the Thunder perform, suggesting that Thunder losses are more about opponent overperformance than their own underperformance. Field goal attempts, rebounds, free throw attempts are all about equal between wins and losses for Oklahoma City.<\/p>\n
About the only notable difference is, in their wins, the Thunder take fewer threes and shoot about 8% better from the floor, and their opponents score about 108 points versus scoring just 115 in games they lose.<\/p>\n
So I suppose the blueprint for beating the Thunder is to try and catch them on an off shooting night where they\u2019re settling for more threes and hope your own team gets a little hot. Otherwise, good luck to you.<\/p>\n
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About the on<\/p>\n
Dwight Powell, Mr. Maverick<\/p>\n
They\u2019ll never make me hate you, Dwight Powell. From Rondo-trade throw-in, to putting up historically efficient offensive numbers (his 2021-22 season is second all-time for Ortg), to a guy who has survived every roster shakeup since the Nowitzki era. He\u2019s gotten to where he is by never trying to do more than he was capable of, filling a specific role, and being the ultimate team-first kind of guy. Who is more deserving to just go out there and run amok for a while? Powell\u2019s three-point shooting experiment ended after 2018-19 (a big reason his offensive efficiency spiked after that), and the most he\u2019s taken in a season since then is 39. Fewer than one attempt every two games. He\u2019s had five or fewer the past three seasons, on only three so far this year. Let him shoot. He should work to surpass his season\u2019s worth of three-point attempts in a single game. Also, I want to see if Adam Silver considers letting Dwight Powell shoot seven threes in a game worthy of a fine for anti-competitive practices.<\/p>\n
How to watch\/listen<\/p>\n
You can watch the game at 7:00 pm on KFAA Channel 29 or MAVS TV (streaming), or listen at 97.1FM KEGL (English), and 99.1FM KFZO (Spanish).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dallas is set to host the West-leading Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday, their final home game before playing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[16733,761,760,1840,2120,59052,227166,13840,355,227167,9600,12205,6402,1053,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-496962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-chet-holmgren","9":"tag-cooper-flagg","10":"tag-dallas-mavericks","11":"tag-denver","12":"tag-detroit","13":"tag-dwight-powell","14":"tag-marvin-bagley","15":"tag-memphis","16":"tag-nba","17":"tag-nowitzki","18":"tag-oklahoma","19":"tag-oklahoma-city","20":"tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","21":"tag-ryan-nembhard","22":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}