OKLAHOMA CITY – Thursday evening, with exactly one month remaining in the regular season, Jason Kidd, Mavericks coach took note of the recent scoring decline across the NBA.
“You can see the physicality is up,” he said. “And everything points to the next season, which is the playoffs.”
Despite the injury, absence of Luka Doncic, that Mavericks-Thunder game televised on TNT at the Paycom Center wasn’t weak at all, but Oklahoma City’s 126-119 victory over Dallas had playoff-like intensity.
And physicality. As they saw their four-game winning streak end against the Thunder 46-20, the Mavericks could have pulled this one out if they didn’t. lost Josh Green to a sprained right ankle in the first quarter and an excessive number of questionable referee calls go against them.
Kyrie Irving led Dallas (38-29) with 36 points and 12 assists and Tim Hardaway Jr. had perhaps his best game in weeks with 21 points and nine rebounds, but the Thunder won the game and the battle wear.
Just when it looked like they were finally healthy, the Mavericks lost Doncic to a left hamstring injury with 6:46 remaining. Wednesday’s home win against Golden State.
He didn’t travel with the team to Oklahoma City, but the Mavericks collectively breathed a sigh of relief before Thursday’s game when they learned that an MRI on Doncic’s hamstring came back clean.
“Great news,” Kidd said, adding that Doncic will be re-evaluated on Friday. The Mavericks’ next game won’t take place until Sunday afternoon, at home against defending champion Denver.
“There’s no one who can compensate for Luka,” Kidd said before Thursday’s tipoff. It’s a great test for us. We’ve had injuries before, playing without Luka and Kai. So this gives us another chance to step up and do their job.
The Mavericks fell to 3-6 in games this season without Doncic.
As if playing without Doncic wasn’t problematic enough, the Mavericks lost Green just 7:48 into the game when he stepped on teammate Derek Lively II’s foot near midcourt and collapsed on the hardwood in agony.
Already, it was off to a somewhat ominous start for Dallas when Daniel Gafford’s streak of 33 consecutive field goals came to an abrupt end – two short of Wilt Chamberlain’s NBA record, old 57 years old.
The sequence occurred on Dallas’ first possession, when Exum got into the lane and missed a 5-footer. Gafford grabbed the offensive rebound, but his contested layup 32 seconds into the game went wide.
Gafford had gone five games without missing a basket. Before Gafford’s run, the longest field goal streaks recorded in the NBA were 35 and 32, both made by Chamberlain in 1967.
While posting the second longest streak, Gafford also surpassed the longest streak since the NBA began recording play-by-play, 22 in a row, by Derrick Favors during the 2019-20 season. After his opening miss on Thursday, Gafford made his next four shots, so, theoretically, the owner would have surpassed the Big Dipper record.
Despite losing Green, the Mavericks were 33-27 after one quarter and 65-63 at halftime, behind 20 points and eight assists from Irving.
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