The Dallas Mavericks are entering the All-Star break on a six-game winning streak after a win over the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday.
The team sits in seventh place in the Western Conference, a game behind Phoenix and New Orleans for fifth place, and expects its improved play to continue as players return from injuries and the second half of the season begins next week.
“I think we’re coming together,” head coach Jason Kidd told the media after Thursday’s win. “We’re starting to get healthy. That’s going to be a little bit of a change because we’re not used to being healthy. Minutes won’t be as high, so guys have to make that adjustment, but our depth should be one of our weapons and, also, our pace.”
Pace was something Kidd and the coaching staff stressed throughout the offseason because of the athleticism the team added in the offseason, but missing key components like rookie center Dereck Lively II, veteran guard Dante Exum, forward Josh Green, guards Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, and several others throughout the season have hampered the progress in that department.
Kidd has also stressed that a big part of dictating the pace comes from the defensive end, where the Mavericks have been known to struggle. They added players in the offseason to help fix it and continued to tinker with the roster at the NBA trade deadline by adding PJ Washington and Daniel Gafford, two frontcourt players known as good defenders who do the little things right.
“I just love what PJ’s doing defensively for us,” Kidd said. “He’s guarding everyone, and he’s guarding them at a high level. That gives us the depth to be able to play him on bigs or bigger wings or even smalls. … His defense is above par, and we need that.”
Lively returned from a broken nose on Wednesday with eight points, five rebounds, and an assist, and Kidd told media members after the game that Exum could rejoin the lineup next week.
While the uptick in health and the recent run have been great signs of what could come, Dallas knows it still has some issues to work out.
“We still have some mistakes going on,” Lively said postgame. “We know that, if we clean up those mistakes and clean up on a couple intangible things, we can take what we’ve done so far and just blow it out of proportion — make sure we get more and more wins and just try to keep going.”