It’s safe to say the Dallas Mavericks will be well prepared for the restart of the NBA season.
Two of the three teams the Mavs will scrimmage against before the restart of the season are mentioned as possible winners of this year’s NBA championship.
The Mavs will open scrimmage play against the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the favorites to win the title, on July 23 at 6 p.m. On July 26 at 3 p.m., the Mavs will take on the Indiana Pacers. And on July 28 at 7:30 p.m., the Mavs will be matched against a Philadelphia 76ers squad some are predicting to win the Eastern Conference.
Those scrimmages will serve as the prelude to the restart of the eight-game regular season, which, for the Mavs, begins on July 31 at 7 p.m. against the Houston Rockets. The scrimmages were established to help give teams some outside competition before the season restarts.
The NBA suspended the regular season on March 11 because of the coronavirus. The Mavs started individual workouts last week.
All scrimmages, regular season and playoff games will be played in Orlando, with the Mavs flying to Florida on Wednesday to begin training camp.
“There’s some people that have compared this kind of thing to coming off of a lockout like we did in 1999 and like we did in 2011,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “The difference is there’s a real long ramp up period with these individual workouts in all the markets, and our training camp time in Orlando is going to be significantly longer than both training camp periods in ‘99 and 2011. So I think the quality of play is going to be very good from the beginning.”
The Mavs are 40-27 and in seventh place in the Western Conference. They conceivably could climb in the standings since they’re only a game-and-a-half behind both the Rockets (40-24) and Oklahoma City (40-24), and just two-and-a-half games behind the No. 4-seeded Jazz (41-23).
The only sure thing is that nobody knows what to expect.
“It’s totally new territory,” Carlisle said. “There are questions each day that are asked that aren’t in the 113 page memorandum (the NBA recently gave to each team).
“But the league has remained variable and maintained kind of a fluid approach as well.”
Of course, the giant elephant in the room is that Florida currently has more cases of the coronavirus than any other state. And that obviously is cause for concern.
“I think there’s nothing more important than staying COVID free,” general manager Donnie Nelson said. “We want everyone to be safe, COVID-free and enter the bubble with all of our bodies intact, all of our players intact, and that’s the most important thing.
“We just want to take every precaution, holding each other accountable. Not just within the practice facility, but as players go back to their families and loved ones that they take every precaution because their health is not only the most important thing to us as an organization, but their health is paramount to us having the kind of run that we hope to have.”
That “run” for the Mavs will start with a scrimmage against LeBron James, Anthony Davis and a high-caliber Lakers’ squad that has the second-best record in the NBA and the best record in the Western Conference at 49-14. Meanwhile, the Pacers and Sixers have identical 39-26 records.
In the meantime, the Mavs are hopeful of picking up where they left off when the season was halted on March 11 after Boban Marjanovic had a career-high 31 points and a season-high 17 rebounds during a 113-97 victory over the Denver Nuggets.
“I believe our guys are really excited, chomping at the bit, tired of shooting at one basket to one coach,” Nelson said. “We’re excited about getting on the plane and going down (to Orlando) and hopefully making a nice run.”
Twitter: @DwainPrice
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