Game 55: San Antonio Spurs (11-43) vs. Dallas Mavericks (31-23)

[DanSchwartzgan]

If you squint your eyes, you are starting to see Lively + Maxi +Green +hopefully healthy Exum + maybe PJ + more rim deterrent with Gafford that the Mavs have several guys who can defend and they may be able to keep at least two on the court at all times.  The added length at the 4 & 5 is a sneaky new development as well. 

PJ's offense has been rough, but I think it says a lot that Kidd had him out there for a long time.  Him and Josh are going to have games where they just don't score a lot.  They just need to find ways to impact the game.

One of the things I said when Exum was starting was it would be hard to dislodge him because starter Exum was dramatically better than off-the-bench Exum.  As a reminder, starter Exum in 14 games was 14.5, 3.6 and 4.4 with a TS% of .720 and a 3% of .533.  Off the bench the shooting is .565 and .350.

Well, starter Green is looking pretty good too.  For the full season as a starter he's 10.6/4/2.5 with a .630 TS% and a .436% from three.  Those last 2 numbers are .561, .389 off the bench.  If you isolate the 20 starts since he returned from injury, the scoring goes up to 12 and the 3% goes up to .454.  For his last 16 games he's averaging 4.5 three attempts per game (hitting 48% of them).  

I heard someone (maybe Dameris) describe PJ as a 'Swiss Army knife' because he has a variety of skills offensively and can guard multiple positions well.  I think you can apply that label to Josh, Exum (and maybe Maxi) also.  In fact, the roster kind of looks like this if you think in terms of stars, SAK's and specialists:

Star:  Luka, Kyrie (I think we'll put Lively here eventually)
S.A.K.:  PJ, Green, Exum and Maxi
Specialist:  THJ, DJJ and Gafford

THJ and DJJ are two sides of the same coin.  I don't know that we need another star, we just need to turn 'the Juniors' into a single player with the skills possessed by both (another Swiss Army Knife).  I really wonder how much run either of them will get in the playoffs when rotations tighten.

A word about Gafford...there was some hand-wringing in the game thread about his +/- compared to Lively.  The team got off to a disastrous start (-13 before Gafford subbed out).  Wemby went nuts and Ky-Luka went 1/7 during that time.  I didn't see anyone point out that Gafford was +13 to start the second half.  Wemby was 0/3 and Ky-Luka went 6/9.  I'm sure the reason no one mentioned it was that it was all Gafford's fault that we got off to a slow start and he had nothing to do with the good team play to start the second half.  Could we please give it a couple weeks before we try to anoint him as the new Powell here that everyone is supposed to hate.  He ended up +2 with a double double and .714 from the field.  Just two more weeks.  That's all I'm asking.  Our bench is going to crush people when everyone is healthy.