Sorry, guys, Kristaps Porzingis is going to be a Dallas Maverick for a while

Some of you Mavericks fans thought you would double your pleasure on Tuesday night – a Luka Doncic victory bomb against the Boston Celtics combined with the first tips from a Kristaps Porzingis trade.

Excuse me. I am reasonably sure that only Doncic’s shots were real (and not entirely sure about that – two points out of 3 in the last 16 seconds?).

Let me just say this. I really don’t intend this to become a standard. We marvel at Luka’s skills at night and then write about Porzingis and what I like about him, just to receive all of his wonderful comments about him the next day. I suspect that declaring Jerry Jones a football genius is the only thing I could type that would arouse more people than my suggestion last week that Porzingis was in the process of showing us why he is here and how he can be the second player most important in a future title team.

I didn’t say it was a close second. And I didn’t say the championship would come soon.

I also didn’t mention how your defense has fallen this season since the last one. I left it out for two reasons and not because it didn’t exactly fit the narrative I was building (although that’s not a bad third reason).

I left it out because its bad defensive numbers span all 17 games. I think plus-minus and efficiency and a number of other metrics require more than 20% of a normal season to gain relevance. I also think that the Mavericks’ poor defense as a team is a much broader story of the 2021 season, their supposed determination to be better in that area, as framed by the replacement of Seth Curry-by-Josh Richardson. Even in the victory over Boston that took Dallas 15-15, the Mavericks allowed an 11 point lead with 3:00 to become a Celtics 1 point lead with 37 seconds to go. What Doncic really did with his 3-point heroism was to save Rick Carlisle from having to discuss another defensive meltdown.

Regardless, the Mavs won consecutive nights without Porzingis in the lineup, as he took care of a back problem that is almost certainly related to out-of-season knee surgery. He may have returned very early in January and the team was extremely cautious with him again, and I know it drives some of you crazy too.

You want him to play. And you want him to be a powerful banger. And you want him to be Nikola Jokic. He is none of those things, although a poor man’s Jokić is not a terrible description, even though you cannot be a “poor man” when your base salary is more than $ 31 million.

I think part of the issue of expectations with Porzingis still comes from trade – more than two full years behind us now – and the influence of the New York media and the national media based there. His determination to bury Knicks owner James Dolan for negotiating with the club’s future savior can only lead one to believe that Porzingis is more than him, that he is simply a modern Ralph Sampson with greater reach.

He was the best player in the Knicks and sending him away for future Mavs picks and discards seemed like a defeat from a New York perspective. The difference here is that people should understand that he is a 22-point, 8-rebound and 2-block guy per game who commanded the painting with some authority last year … and that he never needs to be the best player in Dallas.

Regardless, owner Mark Cuban and Carlisle denied the Bleacher Report’s trading history, and if the Mavericks were to trade it, it certainly wouldn’t happen when their stocks were down. He hasn’t played a game in 11 days. The Mavericks are 7-6 without him this year and 8-9 with him. In fact, the club has a record of 0.580 without him since the beginning of last season and a record of 0.540 with him, but we started to see its importance in a tight playoff series for the Clippers, when the Mavs lost 43 and 14 after suffering the knee injury that required off-season surgery.

His attack was starting to take shape before the ice and snow forced the Mavericks to sit for a week, and now we have to see if he gets ready for big games in Philadelphia on Thursday and in Brooklyn on Saturday night. The rest of the NBA schedule is being released on Wednesday and will certainly include many games on consecutive nights for Dallas, another challenge for Porzingis when he is not 100%.

Anyway, I’m afraid you have Porzingis (and me) to kick around for a little while … although I’m pretty sure the Cuban would be less adamant about not moving to another city if he had the chance.

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