Sorry, folks, Kristaps Porzingis is going to be a Dallas Maverick for a while longer - The Dallas Morning News

Some of you Mavericks fans thought you were going to double your pleasure Tuesday night — a Luka Doncic game-winning bomb against the Boston Celtics combined with the first hints of a Kristaps Porzingis trade.

Sorry. I’m reasonably certain only Doncic’s shots were real (and not totally sure about that — two 3-pointers in the last 16 seconds?).

Let me just say this. I really don’t intend for this to become a pattern. We marvel at Luka’s skills at night and then I write about Porzingis and what I like about him, just to receive all your wonderful feedback on him the next day. I suspect declaring Jerry Jones a football genius is about the only thing I could type that would set off more folks than my suggestion last week that Porzingis was in the process of showing us why he’s here and how he can be the second-most important player on a future title team.

I didn’t say it was a close second. And I didn’t say the championship was coming soon.

I also didn’t mention how his defense has fallen off this season from last. I left that out for two reasons, and not because it didn’t exactly fit the narrative I was constructing (although that’s not a bad third reason).

I left it out because his bad defensive numbers encompass all of 17 games. I think plus-minus and efficiency and a number of other metrics require more than 20% of a normal season to gain any relevance. I also think the Mavericks’ awful defense as a team is a much larger story of the 2021 season, their supposed determination to be better in that area as framed by the Seth Curry-for-Josh Richardson trade. Even in the win over Boston that got Dallas to 15-15, the Mavericks allowed an 11-point lead with 3:00 to play to become a one-point Celtics lead with 37 seconds to go. What Doncic really did with his 3-point heroics was save Rick Carlisle from having to discuss another defensive collapse.

Regardless, the Mavs won on back-to-back nights without Porzingis in the lineup as he nursed a bad back that is almost surely related to his offseason knee surgery. He may have returned too soon in January, and the team is back to being extremely cautious with him again, and I know that drives some of you nuts as well.

You want him to play. And you want him to be a power forward banger. And you want him to be Nikola Jokic. He’s not any of those things although a poor man’s Jokic isn’t a terrible description, even if you’re not allowed to be a “poor man’s anything” when your base salary is upwards of $31 million.

I think part of the expectations issue with Porzingis still stems from the trade — more than two full years behind us now — and the influence of the New York media and the national media based there. Their determination to bury Knicks owner James Dolan for trading the club’s future savior just might lead one to believe Porzingis is more than he is, which is simply a modern day Ralph Sampson with greater range.

He was the best player on the Knicks and to send him away for future picks and Mavs discards seemed self-defeating from the New York perspective. The difference here is that people should grasp that he’s a 20-point, eight-rebound, two-block per game guy who manned the paint with some authority last year ... and that he will never need to be the best player in Dallas.

Regardless, owner Mark Cuban and Carlisle both denied the Bleacher Report trade story, and if the Mavericks were going to trade him it surely wouldn’t happen when his stock is at an all-time low. He hasn’t played a game in 11 days. The Mavericks are 7-6 without him this year and 8-9 with him. Actually, the club has a .580 record without him since the start of last season and a .540 record with him, but we began to see his importance in a tight Clippers playoff series when the Mavs lost by 43 and 14 after he suffered the knee injury that required offseason surgery.

His offense was just coming into form before the ice and snow forced the Mavericks to sit for a week, and now we will have to see if he suits up for big games in Philadelphia on Thursday and Brooklyn on Saturday night. The rest of the NBA schedule was released Wednesday and includes 10 sets of games on back-to-back nights for Dallas, another challenge for Porzingis when he’s not 100%.

Either way, I’m afraid you’ll have Porzingis (and me) to kick around for a while longer ... although I’m fairly certain Cuban would be less adamant about not trading me to another city if he ever got the chance.

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