Accurately Assessing the Mavs Recent Personnel Changes

[Smitty]

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.

Yeah, that's mostly my point. The Mavs had the best defensive rating in the league post TDL and DJJ played just shy of 20 mpg. That means that the entire team defense was good, not just with DJJ playing POA defense next to LuKai. Like we both mentioned, inserting Lively into that group next year gives you a bit less offense and a bit more defense from the Center position, again offsetting some of the difference in Klay vs DJJ. I just see people hung up on this Klay vs DJJ in the starting lineup and assuming it will tank the defense that we saw last year.

To take it further when looking at how Kidd plays his starting lineups (start of first and third Q) the opening day group played 99 minutes in 12 games (8.2 mpg) and then the most used starting lineup prior to the post-TDL change was 88 minutes in 9 games (9.7 mpg). 

So, again too much is being made of the starting lineup. Even if/when Gafford starts... I'm trying to get ahead of it and tell people to relax