What a difference one year has made for Wesley Matthews.
Last Friday the Mavs wing visited Academy in Dallas to take 70 local kids from the Boys & Girls Club on a $200 back-to-school shopping spree. It’s the same spree at the same store as he did almost one year ago to date, but it might as well have been a lifetime ago.
As Matthews visited with the media beforehand, one couldn’t help but think back to 2015 when Matthews, standing in the same exact spot, promised he’d play on opening night. It was a hugely optimistic and relatively unprecedented guarantee to make, as no one has ever recovered so quickly from the type of Achilles injury the then first-year Maverick suffered. Last summer there was almost a cloud following the team into the season, as three starters were recovering from injuries of varying significance. Look at it this way: Matthews was outrageously confident that he’d be the first person ever to bounce back from a significant injury in seven months.
This summer, however, the mood is different. Matthews and his teammates are extremely healthy by comparison. His optimism is not limited merely to getting back on the floor. Now it’s all about, as he put it, “inflicting” his personality on the team.
“There’s a lot of buzz among the team, a lot of edge,” he said. “A lot of edge coming back. That may be mostly me, but that’s OK.”
It shouldn’t have taken one year for Mavs fans to understand what exactly he means. Matthews is grit and toughness personified. To use his own words, he plays with an unparalleled edge. The sequence below sums up the type of player he is, beyond the three-pointers and bow-and-arrows.
You won’t hear any complaints from the coaches if this entire team adopts his personality, and there’s a good chance it could. With the additions of Andrew Bogut as the anchor and Harrison Barnes as another versatile wing defender, the Mavs have assembled perhaps the best defensive starting five, at least at first glance, that we’ve seen around here in a while. Players like Justin Anderson, Quincy Acy, Salah Mejri, and Devin Harris will bring off the bench even more length and athleticism to defend positions 1-5.
Last season the Mavericks ranked 15th in the league in defensive rating at 104.3 points per 100 possessions allowed. That’s an improvement position-wise from 2014-15, when they finished 18th, and an even bigger step up from the 2013-14 squad, which finished 22nd.
“On paper, we’re already better defensively, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Matthews said. “We gotta drill it, we gotta work it, we gotta compete, we gotta go against each other, we gotta battle. It’s probably gonna be different schemes, and we’ve got to learn. I think we’ve got people that are open to it – not that we didn’t last year – but just the ability is different.”
As the old saying goes, offense sells tickets but defense wins championships. And no NBA champion since the 2000-01 Lakers has finished outside the top-10 in defensive rating. The Mavs have finished in that range six times during Dirk Nowitzki’s career, most recently in 2011 and 2012.
Health permitting, the Mavericks have a real shot to land back in the top-10 this season. After essentially almost becoming a new team during the last nine games of 2016, the Mavs used a defense-first mentality to finish 7-2 and make the playoffs. The Dallas D allowed just 96.8 points per 100 possessions starting on March 28, which ranked second in the league during that stretch. The club could very well play all 82 games this season at the slower tempo it embraced during that run to the postseason. It might be unfair to expect that type of stellar rating in 2016-17, but Dallas could be much closer to that number than the 104.3 it allowed for all of 2015-16.
“We’re deeper, we’re more athletic, and we’re a different team. We’re really, really a different team,” Matthews said. “It’ll be interesting to see. I can’t wait to see what (Rick) Carlisle has in store for us. I think we’re gonna surprise a lot of people.”
Unlike last year, Matthews & Co. won’t surprise people just by talking about playing. This time around, they hope their play will do the talking.
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