Mavericks Get 40 Points From Dirk In Win Over Portland
The Dallas Mavericks needed a win as badly as they have all year and got 40 points from Dirk Nowitzki in 12th overtime game this season.
If there’s one thing about the 2015-16 Dallas Mavericks that must be appreciated, it’s the fact that this team absolutely will not quit. A thrilling, if not dominant, 132-120 win over the Portland Trail Blazers just two days after losing to the invincible Golden State Warriors offered clear proof of that.
But the devil’s in the details.
By the fourth quarter, the feeling was that if the Mavericks were going to keep themselves in the playoff bracket in the Western Conference, the 31-point offensive explosion brought forth by Deron Williams would be the reason why – except Dirk Nowitzki ended up dropping 40 points on the Trail Blazers, a team that entered the game as the sixth seed in the conference. It took a 12th overtime game this season, and the second against Portland, but there’s no bigger win this season so far.
The Mavericks remain in the eighth spot, but are now tied with the Houston Rockets with an overall record of 35-35 with 12 games remaining.
Nowtizki, at 37-years-old, enters a rather exclusive club having scored 40 points at his age or older. The only others to do it are Michael Jordan (8 times), Karl Malone (2 times), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (4 times) – and now Dirk.
The Mavericks now own the tiebreaker against Portland as Dallas improves to 2-0 against their conference rivals heading into the third and final meeting on Wednesday. The Mavs trail the ‘Blazers by just a half game and can vault themselves back up the ladder a bit with a win at the venue formerly known as the Rose Garden.
While Nowitzki and Williams certainly took the team on their backs with Parsons out, the play of reserve center Salah Mejri in extended time was impossible to overlook. The Tunisian-born big man had a career night, which included 13 points, 14 rebounds and six blocked shots, each of which causing more and more discouragement for the Trail Blazers where driving the lane was concerned. Mejri’s 32:39 of action clearly enabled the Mavericks to eventually pull away in a game that could have been a season-defining heart-breaker.
Starting center Zaza Pachulia was almost completely ineffective while playing only 4:51 and it’s looking more and more like he’ll be relegated to more of a third-string role from this point forward. The Mavericks are simply a more athletic team when their other double-double machine is on the bench, as strange as that sounds.
If the Mavericks have found anything moving forward that might change their fortunes this season, it’s the acquisition of David Lee and the steady growth of Mejri, who clearly needs more playing time. The rebounds that Dallas rakes in while these two are on the court are simply too valuable to pass up.
As the Mavericks hang on the cliff which drops straight down to the offseason in just a few weeks, the opportunity is there to jump all the way to the sixth-seed and a sweep over Portland on Wednesday. This will be a big game to win because Friday brings the forth and final meeting against Golden State in Oakland and it’s pretty clear how that game’s going to go.
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Either way, the Mavericks made a strong statement at American Airlines Center on Sunday and there’s still time to push towards a playoff position that could bypass the Warriors in favor of either the second-seeded San Antonio Spurs or the third-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder.