DALLAS — Across the past few months, the Dallas Mavericks have figured out every different way to win basketball games. On Sunday, in a 116-107 Game 3 victory against the Minnesota Timberwolves that cemented a 3-0 series lead and all but guarantees Dallas will be headed to the NBA Finals, the team found yet another way.
It was one it hoped never to learn.
At the 8:35 mark of the second quarter, Dallas seemed en route to a convincing four-game sweep. It led by 10 points and had outplayed the Timberwolves even more than the margin suggested. But play had stopped, and 20-year-old rookie Dereck Lively II was sprawled on the ground. Lively had been inadvertently kneed in the back of his head by Karl-Anthony Towns. The injury soon ruled him out for the game with what the team described as a neck sprain.
Lively, the Mavericks’ plus-minus leader this postseason, has been the Mavericks’ third-most important player. The team is plus-23 in the minutes he’s played against Minnesota despite the series’ overall margin being plus-13 to Dallas. And just like that, the center who has transformed this team even while battling through his own tragedy could not continue.
“I went back there (at halftime) and I told him, ‘We got your back,’” Luka Dončić said. “He was pretty shaken up. I hope he’s going to be OK, man.”
Lively being OK matters far more than the competitive, monied entertainment that is this league. There’s no timetable on his return, and when asked about it, Mavericks coach Jason Kidd only acknowledged that the injury was what the team announced while saying they’d see how Lively felt Monday. But Lively has had his team’s back he arrived last summer with the 12th pick of the 2023 NBA draft. He’s grown up faster than anyone, even Dončić, could have imagined. In his absence, it was the rest of the team whose turn it became to have his.
Dallas knew its defense wouldn’t quite be the same without Lively’s presence.
“It was going to be a battle of shotmaking (in the fourth quarter),” Kidd said. “The rim protection wasn’t quite there for both (teams).”
But Dallas also knew it had figured out new ways to win, ones foreign to past Dončić-led iterations, time and time again this season. It had won the opening game of this conference finals with just six made 3s, which has only happened eight times in games Dončić has played since arriving in 2018. (Dallas lost the first six, won one after the team’s trade deadline acquisitions this season and won again in Game 1.) It had recreated its winning formula to involve grit, defense and dunks.
“We’ve got some, as we say, bad MF-ers in that locker room, man,” said Kyrie Irving, asked to identify the throughline to this team’s success. “We’ve got some guys who don’t care about the dirty work and doing the little things for us to win. We’ve always preached selflessness in that locker room.”
And so Dallas found yet another way for Lively, and the needed 3-0 cushion this team needs to overcome any extended absence he might face.
THIS. DUO. 🤩
Luka: 33 PTS, 5 3PM, 7 REB, 5 AST, 5 STL
Kyrie: 33 PTS (14 in 4Q), 3 3PM, 4 ASTMavs take a 3-0 lead in the West Finals! pic.twitter.com/KJYawcmsEl
— NBA (@NBA) May 27, 2024
It cannot be overstated how necessary it was for Dallas to win this game once Lively exited. Its task when entering the fourth quarter tied at 87 was to stamp out any hope the Timberwolves might have received when Lively’s absence created softer driving lanes. A game once seemingly determined in its outcome now pushed this conference finals into potential uncertainty due to uncontrollable factors. “Injuries are part of the game,” Kidd said.
It was Kidd’s calm, and Irving’s, that propelled Dallas to its fifth straight win in this postseason.
While Dallas’ stars were better, so were their role players. Daniel Gafford, the team’s starting center and only remaining rotation big with Lively and Maxi Kleber sidelined due to injury, struggled for much of Game 3. He was briefly benched in the fourth quarter, subbing out at the 8:25 mark before returning with 6:56 remaining in the final frame. Kidd said it was a planned rotation, one which he swapped in P.J. Washington as another “sprinter.” Dallas has used consistent rotation patterns for Lively and Gafford as part of an ongoing effort to encourage its big men to run every possession, whether its offense or defense, to leave their marks on the game. But at the time, Dallas could have simply stayed small, prioritizing its offense in a game Kidd knew would come down to shotmaking.
Instead, Gafford re-emerged and thrived in the closing minutes Lively normally plays. What had been struggles turned into consecutive game-clinching plays: a block on Mike Conley’s layup with 56 seconds remaining and an and-one alley-oop dunk from Dončić 22 seconds later that all but sealed Dallas’ place in the Finals. If Lively saw it, he would have celebrated that play even more than Gafford’s scream, a noise that must have emanated from his soul after he came crashing down on the baseline.
GAFFORD ONE HAND FOR THE LOB ‼️
DALLAS IS MAYHEM 🔊🔊
📺 TNT pic.twitter.com/Aq2iush7FN
— NBA (@NBA) May 27, 2024
“We have, like I always say, a great team,” Dončić said.
The ever-increasing difficult shotmaking of Dončić and Irving in the fourth quarter may have sealed Game 3 for the Mavericks. But it was everything else — this team’s soul, always resilient and truly adaptable — that allowed those two to carry Dallas to victory. It was another winning formula born from unwanted circumstances, one that the team nevertheless figured out. What Dončić did, and how Irving complemented him, was what this team, now one small step from competing for the game’s ultimate prize, is built upon.
The Mavericks still must win once more over Minnesota, and they haven’t overlooked that challenge. It’ll be harder if Lively cannot play in Game 4 or beyond. But Dallas, ever since it became the post-trade deadline team we’ve become accustomed to watching, has solved even those ill-timed misfortunes. They’ll be asked to do it again.
And whether it’s in Tuesday’s Game 4, or soon after, it feels certain that Dallas has found enough solutions, regardless of its circumstances, to discover yet another way again.
(Top photo: David Dow / NBAE via Getty Images)
