The first sportswriter from New York armed with Knicks questions for Kristaps Porzingis arrived in Dallas last Tuesday.
By the time Porzingis and the rest of the Mavericks fly back to Texas after Thursday’s highly anticipated reunion game at Madison Square Garden, he will have played his former team twice. He will also have endured nearly 10 consecutive days of fielding queries about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the Knicks — and the state of his game nine months later.
The Mavericks, though, don’t seem terribly concerned about this stretch of drama overload for their marquee newcomer. They prefer to focus on all the Knicks-free pavement in front of them for the rest of the season.
It is an easier position to take, mind you, if you believe — as Mavericks officials do — that Porzingis is ahead of schedule in his comeback.
“He is so much further on than I expected after 20 months off,” Mark Cuban, Dallas’s team owner, said on Monday, hours before Porzingis endured a foul-plagued nightmare in Boston in which he missed 10 of 11 shots from the field.
“I expected him to be rustier,” Cuban said. “And add that to a new system, new teammates, new city.”
Garden-goers can expect to see a different sort of Porzingis, 24, when he makes his first appearance at the Garden since the fateful night he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 6, 2018
The Mavericks are generally using him in six-minute bursts as he continues to rebuild his stamina after such an extended period of rehabilitation. Porzingis is also still in the process of restoring the requisite confidence in his legs to throw himself into crowds.
In spite of such limitations, Porzingis is averaging a more-than-passable 18.3 points, 7.9 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game in Dallas’s 6-4 start. In the biggest adjustment, he is spending more time beyond the 3-point line than he ever did as a Knick and is averaging 6.2 attempts per game from long distance, up from his highest figure (4.8 per game) in New York.
A whopping 43 percent of Porzingis’s shots in 2017-18 were what many teams regard as dreaded “long 2s” — shots from at least 10 feet but short of the 3-point line. The Mavericks are trying to wean Porzingis off the increasingly devalued shot. As Coach Rick Carlisle explained last week, Dallas’s staff is convinced that Porzingis is “one of the best spacers in the history of the game if you look at the analytics on it.”
“When he’s out above the arc, it has an amazing positive effect on the team that he’s playing for, whether it was New York or whether it’s us,” Carlisle said.
Porzingis’s presence on the perimeter, and his proficiency on catch-and-shoot opportunities from 3-point range, draws the opposition’s size away from the basket. That, in turn, opens driving lanes for the Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, who has taken an immediate leap from his Rookie of the Year Award-worthy debut season to certifiable franchise-player production.
Yet Carlisle acknowledged that the Mavericks were “still tweaking some things” offensively, because they don’t want Porzingis to feel marginalized in this gestation period of his partnership with Doncic. For all the hope that Porzingis and Doncic will ultimately form a new-age version of Dallas’s storied tag team of Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash, there is no getting around the fact that in the 224 minutes they have played together, Dallas is averaging just 101.7 points per 100 possessions, which would rank 28th in the league. In Doncic’s 125 minutes without Porzingis, Dallas has been an offensive juggernaut, averaging 124.7 points per 100 possessions.
Porzingis admitted after his Boston woes that he was guilty of “maybe forcing some things” amid stretches he hasn’t received the ball “as much as I’d like to.” The Mavericks have likewise come to learn that Porzingis isn’t always patient with himself — as evidenced by a nine-minute session with reporters at his locker last week in which Porzingis was deeply self-critical of his 4-for-14 shooting against Orlando.
After describing himself as “the first person that wants to get out of this moment,” Porzingis watched film with Carlisle the next day and began to ease up on himself. Porzingis conceded that he “maybe overreacted a little bit.”
Of course, given the news media caldron in which he spent his first three and a half N.B.A. seasons, perhaps it was an inevitable overreaction. Porzingis is bound to gradually realize and embrace the fact that scrutiny and criticism in Cowboys-obsessed Dallas won’t approach the levels he is accustomed to, which should be a boost to his comeback efforts.
To wit: The Knicks may have won Round 1 against the Mavericks on Friday night in Dallas with their most complete performance of the season, but a 2-8 start and heavy home losses to Sacramento and Cleveland appear to have plunged Coach David Fizdale, and perhaps even the front-office duo of Steve Mills and Scott Perry, into a job-security crisis earlier than anyone expected. Just in time for Porzingis’s return, his old team is in crisis.
Perceptions have changed since the Knicks dealt Porzingis to the Mavericks on Jan. 31. In some corners of the league, Dallas was assailed for potentially surrendering too much — two future first-round picks packaged with the promising young guard Dennis Smith Jr., in addition to taking on the expensive contracts of Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee — for a player with Porzingis’s injury history. It was widely presumed that the Knicks made the deal with the knowledge that a significant free-agent score was looming. The price doesn’t look quite as steep now; not after the Knicks flopped in free agency despite the team owner James L. Dolan’s hints at major signings in a March radio interview.
The New York Police Department said this week that there is no update on an investigation it opened in March after a complaint brought by a woman who said Porzingis sexually assaulted her at their Manhattan apartment building in February 2018. Porzingis, who has not been charged, has denied the allegation.
The Mavericks, when it was their turn, bestowed a five-year, $158 million contract upon Porzingis in the first allowable minutes of free agency on June 30 and have made the player’s comfort level a priority after watching how quickly his relationship with the Knicks spiraled.
One example: Dallas has hired Manolo Valdivieso, Porzingis’s physiotherapist from Spain, after the Knicks refused to do so. It is a concession that the Mavericks have made to a franchise centerpiece before; Nowitzki’s physiotherapist from Germany, Jens Joppich, still drops in for occasional work with various Dallas players even though Nowitzki retired in April.
“It’s a new N.B.A.,” Cuban said, adding that it’s incumbent on teams today, when it comes to their stars, “to try to re-earn their loyalty every day.”
Until they can pinpoint a new face of the franchise to succeed Porzingis, it will be difficult to dispute that the Knicks are struggling mightily to adapt to it. No matter what happens Thursday night.
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Corner Three
You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)
Looking at the Phoenix Suns’ brilliant start to the season, do you think they are playoff material? Or will they flame out? — Alade Idowu (Abuja, Nigeria)
Stein: We love getting questions from readers tracking the N.B.A. so keenly from afar, but I have to check you on the use of “brilliant.” That’s a step too far even for those who would co-sign the contention that Phoenix has been the league’s opening-month surprise team.
Deandre Ayton’s 25-game suspension for using a banned diuretic, in the midst of the Suns’ unforeseen 6-3 start, has to diminish the team’s delight at least somewhat. Such a significant early setback in Ayton’s sophomore season, after he was selected No. 1 over all in the June 2018 draft ahead of Dallas’s Luka Doncic and Atlanta’s Trae Young, is not what Phoenix officials needed to see.
The Suns and their long-suffering fans, though, deserve to enjoy this moment. Phoenix awoke Tuesday on the cusp of a spot in the top 10 in both offensive efficiency (No. 4 at 110.9 points per 100 possessions) and defensive efficiency (No. 12 at 103.7 points per 100 possessions). No one, frankly, expected that at any point of the season from this team.
Because the playoff bar is so high in the West, caution is advised for anyone daring to dream of a Suns return to the postseason for the first time since 2010. Yet you can safely celebrate the off-season arrivals of the veteran point guard Ricky Rubio and the burly big man Aron Baynes — two players whose skill sets clearly enhance the talents of Devin Booker.
What made it difficult to fairly evaluate the coaching of Igor Kokoskov in his lone season in charge is the fact that the 2018-19 Suns had nothing close to a starting N.B.A. point guard to line up alongside Booker. Rubio’s unquestioned credentials in keeping a team organized — coupled with Baynes’s screen-setting, expanding range as a long-distance shooter and natural instincts as a defensive anchor — have helped Booker (54.5 percent shooting from the field and 53.2 percent shooting on 3-pointers) establish a pace that would represent a significant step forward in efficiency under Kokoskov successor Monty Williams.
How long can Phoenix maintain its status in the N.B.A.’s upper third at both ends? Are the Suns actually going to bring a halt to the league’s second-longest active playoff drought before Sacramento ends its league-leading dry spell of 13 seasons and counting? How well Ayton assimilates upon his projected return in December will be a determining factor in answering many of the questions this team is generating.
I’m aware this is somewhat impossible to answer, but do you think the Braves would have survived to this day in Buffalo if the team didn’t leave town in 1978? — Stephen Walczyk
Stein: Stephen is responding to a Twitter rant of mine from last week in which I (loudly) lamented the demise of my beloved Buffalo Braves in 1978 after just eight seasons — and he’s right. The question is a hypothetical with no definitive response.
I left western New York at age 9, during the same summer that the Braves ultimately landed in San Diego after a complicated ownership swap with the Boston Celtics, and thus can’t claim to be an expert on the true ceiling of Buffalo’s 1970s economy.
The former Braves owner Paul Snyder, in a wonderful Buffalo News piece from 2016 written by my pal Bucky Gleason, insisted the N.H.L.’s Buffalo Sabres could not have survived financially in the same city if the Braves had stayed. That would have devastated sports-loving Buffalonians, too, if Snyder was indeed right.
All I do know, after reading Gleason’s piece over and over, is that those at the time who prioritized college basketball over N.B.A. basketball are the ones with some real explaining to do. Canisius, which quickly faded from prominence after the Braves’ exit, had all the power in those days in terms of getting the best dates at the old Memorial Auditorium.
What’s also clear, once you scroll through that Twitter rant and acquaint yourself with the names of the many N.B.A. legends squandered by the Braves in their brief existence, is that the power brokers in the city back then had no clue how valuable the local basketball team actually was. Moses Malone, Bob McAdoo, Adrian Dantley, Dr. Jack Ramsay — all were shooed away for financial reasons instead of being granted the chance to build a powerhouse together.
Even though I’m a Knicks fan, I’m a basketball fan first after growing up in Ridgewood, Queens, in my father’s candy store and reading six newspapers a day. Walt Frazier’s 36 points and 19 assists in Game 7 of the 1970 N.B.A. finals against the Lakers is the greatest performance I’ve ever seen in a winner-take-all game. Can you comment? — Jonathan B. Avins (Wyomissing, Pa.)
Stein: To respond properly, first we have to establish if we’re talking solely about the N.B.A. finals or any Game 7 in playoff history.
The field grows particularly wide if we take the latter approach. Dirk Nowitzki’s Game 7 for Dallas at San Antonio in the second round of the 2006 playoffs, just to name one example, will always stand out for me from an absolute classic of a series. Nor will I soon forget Kawhi Leonard’s walk-off jumper from the corner in May for Toronto that smooched the rim four times before falling through and eliminating Philadelphia in another second-round classic.
Assuming I can talk you into the simplicity of making this a finals-only discussion, complications will nonetheless persist because we all tend to favor the games we saw in real time. I can’t claim to have firsthand visions of Frazier’s heroics in what is more commonly remembered as the Willis Reed Game, or Jerry West’s in 1969 when he became the first (and only) player in league history from the losing team to win finals M.V.P. honors, or Bill Russell’s 30 points and (gulp) 40 rebounds in Game 7 of the 1962 finals.
James Worthy’s Game 7 triple-double for the Los Angeles Lakers against Detroit in 1988 to clinch back-to-back titles for L.A. was a biggie just as I had begun college, but it’s hard to top what LeBron James did with Miami in 2013 in perhaps the best finals I’ve covered in my 27 seasons on the N.B.A. beat. It’s not just the totals James posted (37 points and 12 rebounds) in the title decider. San Antonio’s 3-2 series lead and the manner in which the Heat escaped defeat in Game 6 against the Spurs’ seminal trio of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili — as well as a young Leonard — made that Game 7 even more memorable.
None of this, of course, is intended to slight Mr. Frazier. I suspect my viewpoint would be much closer to yours had I been able to witness the Knicks’ 1970 title run. I can tell you that I have greatly enjoyed Puma’s renaissance as a basketball brand largely because it has resuscitated Clyde’s distinctive signature shoe — which, as a nostalgic hoop sap, I naturally love.
Numbers Game
2
A good history lesson from my pal @ByTimReynolds of The Associated Press: There have been only two days in league history in which players on two separate teams scored at least 50 points and lost. The first was April 9, 1978, when Denver’s David Thompson (73 points) and San Antonio’s George Gervin (63) waged an unforgettable battle on the final night of the regular season for the scoring title — won narrowly by Gervin. The other was Friday, when Golden State’s D’Angelo Russell (52 points in a loss at Minnesota) and Portland’s Damian Lillard (60 points in a home defeat to the Nets) could not deliver victory despite their offensive outbursts.
13
In a dramatic turnaround, Houston’s Russell Westbrook finished +40 in a 129-112 home victory last Wednesday over Golden State, meaning the Rockets outscored the Warriors by 40 points when Westbrook was on the floor. Just three nights earlier, in a 129-100 loss at Miami, Westbrook was -46. According to Basketball Reference, only 13 players since the 2000-1 season have finished a game with a plus/minus of -46 or worse.
19
Luka Doncic has assisted on 19 baskets this season by his teammate Maxi Kleber — compared with only 18 assists to Kristaps Porzingis. Only four of those Doncic assists to Porzingis, furthermore, have come at the rim. By contrast, in Los Angeles, 18 of LeBron James’s 26 assists to Anthony Davis entering Tuesday’s play were passes at the rim.
208
A record 208 players on opening night rosters, accounting for 42 percent of the league, had N.B.A. G League experience on their résumés. Of the 63 referees in the N.B.A. G League, 25 are women. The 28-team developmental league began its 19th season Friday.
2
Two of the N.B.A.’s 70 referees played in the league: Haywoode Workman (eight seasons) and the Cal State Fullerton legend Leon Wood.
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Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
