On Sunday afternoon, superstar Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks took their first loss of the post All-Star game portion of the NBA slate with a brutal road defeat at the hands of the Indiana Pacers in a bit of inter-conference basketball action. Although Doncic put up his usual incredible stats, registering 33 points, six rebounds, and six assists in the defeat, Dallas’ offense as a whole was unable to get much going as compared to their usually lofty standards.
After the game, Mavericks head coach and former NBA Hall of Fame point guard Jason Kidd got one hundred percent honest on what went wrong for the Mavericks in the defeat.
“We just couldn’t throw it in the ocean. We had a couple of bad shots that took away some of the energy. We’ll learn from it. We’ll watch this, and we’ll get better tomorrow,” said Kidd, per Grant Afseth of DallasBasketball.com on X, the social media platform formerly referred to as Twitter.
While the 111 points that the Mavericks scored on Sunday in Indiana might have been enough to win a game if we were in the year 2014, we are now in the year 2024, and teams in the modern era generally need to hit the 120 mark to feel good about their chances of winning.
Oddly enough, that mark hasn’t been much of an issue this year, but Dallas’ role players outside of Doncic and Kyrie Irving struggled mightily on Sunday, en route to the loss.
Up next for Dallas is a road game vs the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday.