Accurately Assessing the Mavs Recent Personnel Changes

[mvossman]

Everyone is worried about the starting lineup, I get it. DJJ was huge for the Mavs, but some context... The Mavs had the best defense in the league when they changed the starting lineup post-TDL. In that time the starting lineup of Luka, Kyrie, DJJ, PJW, Gafford played 176 minutes together in 17 games. That's an average of 10.3 mpg. In the playoffs, the starters played 236 minutes together in 22 games, an average of 10.7 mpg. Basically, the first 5 minutes of the first and third quarter.

Kidd doesn't play his starting lineup big minutes together like the Nuggets do (19.9 mpg regular season, 22.8 mpg playoffs). It was one of my complaints when the lineup data was great but it didn't get used enough. Bottom line, there's a big deal being made about team defense with Klay starting in place of DJJ when in reality it's all about rotations. The only thing that really has to happen is for the starting lineup to have a positive net rating, which I think it will (insert Lively).

I think part of the reason the starting rotation minutes were not as big is because we were bringing our best center off the bench.  If you take the center position out of the numbers, the PJ/DJJ/Luka/Kyrie lineup in the playoffs was a lot closer to the 20 minutes of the Nuggets.  Another way to look at this is the Mavs had 3 offense first players in the top 9 playoff rotation (Luka, Kyrie and THJ) and they played less than 100 minutes (5 minutes a game) together.  

That being said, starting and finishing with Klay only really means roughly 10 minutes a game that they are committed to playing Luka/Kyrie/Klay together.  There is a strong argument to staggering the three of them (like they stagger Luka and Kyrie) as much as they can to spread out the offense (regardless of the potential need to do so defensively).  I don't think its going to be a problem in the regular season, and we can worry about the playoffs when we see how this all works out on the court.