Dallas Mavericks: 5 Reasons Behind Surprising Start
The Dallas Mavericks are off to a surprising 10-7 start, but how exactly has it happened?
Heading into the 2015-16 season, the Dallas Mavericks were considered a tanking team at worst and a fringe playoff team at best.
Since they will lose their first round draft pick if it falls outside the top seven, and since their best players were a 37-year-old Dirk Nowitzki, a post-Achilles injury Wesley Matthews and Chandler Parsons, most expectations leaned closer toward Western Conference bottom feeder.
And yet, a month into the new NBA season, the Mavs have been the league’s most surprising success story, starting the year off with a solid 10-7 record — good for the fourth seed in the West so far.
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Dallas hasn’t done anything flashy to get there. They don’t have a single 20-point per game scorer, they’re not elite by any available metric and over the course of a full 82-game season, it’s unlikely they’ll remain as high up in the standings as they are now.
But the Mavericks have also done what good teams typically do: beat inferior opponents. Dallas may be 3-6 against teams that are .500 and above, but they’re a stellar 7-1 against opponents under .500. Aside from Rick Carlisle being worth even more than his recent $35 million contract extension, here’s a look at how the Mavericks have gotten off to such a great start.
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