The Mavericks hit the road Thursday night for the first time in 22 days.
Their ballhandling skills did not make the trip with them.
A season-worst night of turnovers doomed them as the Mavericks opened a three-game journey with a major thud, dropping a 111-97 decision to Philadelphia in a game the 76ers led by as much as 26 points midway through the fourth quarter.
The Mavericks had played eight successive games at home and won six of them. They opened this trip against the top team (by record) in the Eastern Conference. And things did not go well.
They had 22 turnovers, five more than their previous worst total for a game this season.
“Disappointing game,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “The second quarter kind of blew things open for them. We turned it over a lot. We didn’t do a good job of moving the ball.
“You’re not going to win on the road against the top team in the East with 22 turnovers. That was our biggest problem.”
But not the only one. While the Sixers’ defense did its job in taking the Mavericks’ offense out of their game, Luka Dončić and company could not generate a consistent attack on offense. The 97 points represented just the fourth time this season they have been kept under 100 points.
“We just didn’t play with energy,” said Dončić, who had 19 points but also seven of the Mavericks’ turnovers. “It didn’t look like us out there. We just didn’t bring the energy.”
The All-Star duo of Joel Embiid (23 points, nine rebounds) and Ben Simmons (15 points, seven assists) got plenty of help from former Mavericks guard Seth Curry (15 points). But the Sixers won the game with their defense.
The Mavericks struggled all evening to shot 40 percent – and that was only when they could actually hang onto the ball. They finished shooting 41 percent from the field.
And while the Sixers had something to do with the Mavericks’ offensive woes, they didn’t help themselves, either.
“They were aggressive, we didn’t execute well,” Carlisle said. “Our spacing was not good enough and our ball movement wasn’t good enough. When you have high-level defenders at virtually every position like they do, the ball’s got to move. You got to create some scrambles offensively so that they can’t get their defense set. So that led to problems.”
The Mavericks fell behind by 20 points in the second quarter. And even when they knuckled down defensively in the third quarter, they still had eight turnovers in that period and eventually were blown out.
“We learned that the Sixers are a good team, first and foremost,” said Jalen Brunson. “I don’t want to say one of those nights because we can have pretty bad nights and still find ways to win.
“They’re a good team, active hands, obviously a steals-and-deflections team. They just did what they do well. And we got to do what we do good as well.”
The Mavericks slipped back below .500 at 15-16 with the loss. The Sixers, who are 43-4 over the last two seasons at Wells Fargo Center, improved to an Eastern Conference-leading 22-11.
Life gets no easier for the Mavericks as they face Kevin Durant, James Harden, Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets on Saturday.
There were several subplots to the game. It was the first trip back to Philly for Josh Richardson and also the first time for Seth Curry to play against the Mavericks as a member of the Sixers. The guards were traded for each other in the offseason and both came into the game with exactly the same scoring average: 12.9 points per game.
Only Curry (11 points in the first half) had a significant impact in the early going.
The Mavericks were more reliant on Brunson, who has a flair for coming up big in Philadelphia, having spent part of his youth growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of Philly. He would finish with 11 points and five rebounds.
It should be no surprise that Brunson averaged 12 points, 7.5 rebounds and 7 assists in his first two visits to Philly against the Sixers.
And, of course, he had a fair amount of success in college at nearby Villanova, where he was the collegiate player of the year in 2018 and won two NCAA championships.
Twitter: @ESefko
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