The biggest winner for the Mavericks in the playoffs so far – besides Jalen Brunson and his accountant – might be Jason Kidd.
If any Maverick had to expect a skeptical audience this season, it was their new coach. He had a 183-190 coaching record in one season at Brooklyn and three-plus at Milwaukee.
He was following Rick Carlisle, whose voice had gone stale, but also the only coach to lead the Mavericks to a championship, albeit a decade earlier.
Clearly there was some proving that needed to be done.
Proof came fast.
Kidd arrived in Dallas on June 28 and in the past 10 months has erased doubts faster than a teacher erasing test answers off the chalkboard.
And answers to the test are important to Kidd, by the way.
He often talks about giving players the answers and letting them go take the test on the court.
That’s what he’s done so far in the first-round playoff series against Utah.
With no Luka Dončić so far because of a left calf muscle injury, Kidd has improvised. He’s put the ball in the hands of Jalen Brunson and Spencer Dinwiddie and the confidence throughout the team has not wavered.
That’s why Kidd is getting mentioned as a coach of the year candidate, even though he wasn’t part of that conversation for most of the season.
But the Mavericks’ 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series hasn’t been built simply by outworking and outthinking the Jazz. This is the culmination of a season’s worth of preaching that the Mavericks – with or without Dončić – won’t be all they can be if they don’t depend on each other, trust each other and hold each other accountable.
And they have to believe in Kidd and his staff, too.
“It doesn’t work if your guys don’t trust you,” Kidd said late Thursday after the 126-118 win at Vivant Arena that regained the home-court edge for the Mavericks. “I trust every one of those guys that puts on a uniform. My job is to help put them in a position to be successful. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t.
“But the communication of us being able to talk, even when we lose, about how can we get better. That’s the cool thing about that group. It’s not about the coaches. We’re here to just try to help and they (players) do the work.”
That was the same mentality Kidd had as a player. He was the worker, but he depended on Carlisle and his staff to make sure they had all the answers.
It was up to the players to execute those answers.
So far, against the Jazz, the execution has been off the charts.
“They’re playing great,” Luka said before Friday’s practice. “The game plan is incredible. They (the Jazz) tried to do something different (in Game 3) playing small ball. So we just followed the game plan and executed. But everybody’s playing great. We’ve been playing like this the whole season.”
When Dončić returns, it’s going to require some tweaking in the rotation. But what Kidd has said it won’t require is major adjustments to the system. The drive-and-kick game figures to get even better when Luka returns.
And while Brunson has been fantastic, getting him some breathers on the court would be a good thing. He played more than 40 minutes in the first two games and logged 21 minutes in the second half of Game 3 after a lower-back injury limited him to 14 minutes in the first half.
What neither Kidd nor any of the players can bank on, though, is the 3-point shooting staying as unconscious as it’s been in the last two games.
The Mavericks hit 43 percent (18-for-42) in Game 3 and 47 percent in Game 2 (22-of-47).
The good news is that, even if the shooting levels out, their defensive effort has been good enough to give them a chance to win all three games against the Jazz, who aren’t exactly a well-oiled machine at this point offensively.
The Mavericks may get Dončić back for Game 4 on Saturday afternoon. But either way, the structure of their system and the belief in Kidd and his staff has put the Mavericks in a position of power going into a game that has to be viewed as ultra-critical for the Jazz.
“We’ve always believed from Day One that we’re a team,” Kidd said. “And that’s who we are, a team. They trust one another.”
Twitter: @ESefko
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