Following a five-day break to pause for the NBA All-Star game, the Dallas Mavericks were back on the practice court Tuesday in preparation for the second half of the season.
It was the Mavs’ first time together since last Wednesday when they defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder, 87-78, at American Airlines Center. And they were more than happy to see each other again.
“The first practice after the break can take on different forms,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “But our guys seemed enthusiastic to be back on the floor with each other.
“We had a lifting segment at the beginning, then we got right into it. We didn’t go that long, but we got a good sweat and we got some reps and now we’ll get ready for tomorrow.”
The Mavs (18-16) will open the second half of the season on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. against the San Antonio Spurs (18-14) at AAC. It’s an ideal time for the Mavs to make some headway in the Western Conference standings since they’re currently seated eighth and are only one game behind the seventh-seated Spurs.
Carlisle said those coronavirus issues that cost the Mavs an NBA-high 41 players-missed games played no role in Tuesday’s practice, and that all the players reported injury-free.
“My understanding is we got through all the testing things during the break with no issue,” Carlisle said. “If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had everybody at practice today, obviously.
“And coming out of this practice, to my knowledge everyone is healthy.”
In the first half of the season, Maxi Kleber, Dorian Finney-Smith, Josh Richardson, Jalen Brunson and Dwight Powell all missed considerable time dealing with health and safety protocols issues. And when the Mavs peel back the onion on what transpired in the first half of the season, those players’ absences played a vital role in Dallas opening the season with a 9-14 record.
“For us as a team it’s been crazy up and down, I would say,” Kleber told Mavs.com. “At the beginning (of the season) not everybody was healthy, short pre-season, playing (the regular season), and then all of a sudden we have guys out because of protocols with corona. We never really had a full team there to play in practice, and it’s kind of representative of what we did on the court.
“There was not too much consistency that we started up with, but I think we did a good job of turning it around. Especially like the days that we had the break where Dallas unfortunately had this big winter storm. We used the time after that for some practices before we started playing again, and everybody was healthy, which helped us too.”
After that brutal 9-14 start to the season, the Mavs enter the second half of their schedule with a sparkling 9-2 record in their last 11 games. The only team playing better over their respective last 11 games are the Brooklyn Nets, whose lone loss while piling up a 10-1 record was to the Mavs, 115-98, on Feb. 27.
Of course, when a team has 16 losses, any player or coach will admit there are a few areas of improvements that obviously needs to be addressed.
“One improvement I’m hoping is that we can avoid any more Covid issues,” Carlisle said. “That’s something that really was a big challenge for us.
“We just want to continue growing this group together. It’s a group of young guys that have had some time together, that are building more and more chemistry as time goes on. We’ve got to have an us against the world mentality to try to continue to play well and move up in a difficult Western Conference.”
Although the Mavs have one of the Top 5 easiest schedules in the second half of the season, it’s compounded by the fact that they’re slated to play 38 games in 68 days. That includes 10 set of back-to-backs, topped only by the 11 that the Memphis Grizzlies and Spurs have.
One of the Mavs’ back-to-back is occurring right away as they play in Oklahoma City on Thursday — one day after entertaining the Spurs.
“We’re going to have a walk-through late afternoon tomorrow and then going into the second half of the season we want to keep the momentum going,” Carlisle said. “Every one of these games is going to be important.
“San Antonio, they’re leading the division right now and we’re the hunters. We’re trying to keep moving up.”
Twitter: @DwainPrice
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