Dallas Mavericks: Where Will Raymond Felton Fit In?
By Bryce Olin
Raymond Felton is finally healthy and his suspension is nearly over, but what’s his role with the Dallas Mavericks?
In order to get defensive stopper Tyson Chandler back from the New York Knicks, the Dallas Mavericks were forced to take Raymond Felton and his contract in the trade.
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After recovering from sprained ankle for the first few weeks of the season, Felton is finally healthy, which means he started his four-game suspension on Monday during the Mavericks game against the Charlotte Hornets. Felton was handed the four-game suspension by the NBA after Felton pled guilty to criminal possession of a firearm, which stemmed from an incident with his wife in New York.
If everything goes accordingly, and it should, Felton’s first game with the Mavs should be Nov. 24 against the Indiana Pacers.
Although Felton will finally be able to play, I can’t say with any certainty that he will see any time at all for the Mavs.
| Rk | Player | G | MP | FG | FGA | FG% | 3P% | TRB | AST | STL | PTS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monta Ellis | 11 | 31.6 | 7.4 | 15.3 | .482 | .310 | 2.5 | 4.2 | 1.2 | 18.4 |
| 5 | Jameer Nelson | 11 | 25.5 | 2.5 | 7.0 | .364 | .380 | 2.3 | 4.3 | 0.7 | 7.1 |
| 6 | Devin Harris | 11 | 23.1 | 2.7 | 6.2 | .441 | .353 | 1.7 | 4.4 | 1.3 | 8.6 |
| 9 | Jose Barea | 10 | 15.9 | 2.9 | 6.8 | .426 | .250 | 1.5 | 4.1 | 1.0 | 7.2 |
Provided by Basketball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 11/18/2014.
The Mavs’ backcourt is crowded as it is. Monta Ellis and Jameer Nelson are the starters, and each has been playing well to start the season. Devin Harris and J.J. Barea are the backup guards, and they’ve each been playing well, too.
I guess that’s the problem of playing for a good team. Felton is definitely not in New York anymore.
To say the Dallas Mavericks are just a “good” team is quite the understatement, also.
Offensively, the 2014-15 Mavs are one of the best teams the league has ever seen, posting an offensive rating of 115.5 through the first 11 games of the season.
Here’s a look at Felton’s career numbers and play in recent years:
Provided by Basketball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 11/18/2014.
It’s not like Felton is a bad player or has been a bad player his whole career. Outside of Portland, people can generally agree that Felton hasn’t been horrible his whole career. At his best, Felton was a good, not great, point guard:
That video is from 2012-13, two full years and, roughly, 50 pounds ago.
I just don’t see where Felton’s game translates to the Mavs. Plus, for that video of Felton’s “good” play, there’s roughly 200 videos of his bad play on Youtube. Unfortunately, most of them have explicit language that isn’t allowed on Hoops Habit, but you can find them if you use the Google machine.
The most troubling aspect of this this fit for Dallas is that Felton isn’t a 3-point shooter; he’s shot above 36 percent only once in his career.
In his tenth season, I don’t think Felton’s magically going to find a consistent jumper. If he can’t shoot, he can’t space the floor, which offers head coach Rick Carlisle little incentive to find him a spot in the rotation. All the others players in the Mavs’ backcourt can shoot. If Felton can’t, that’s going to be a problem.
To his credit– and I don’t want to make this too much of a Felton bash session–Felton has been a decent pick-and-roll option in his career.
With the Knicks, largely, that was Felton’s role, to create in the pick-and-roll, and it worked sometimes. If you have eyes, you can see Felton is a horizontally big point guard. Against weaker guards, Felton can use his body to create space, shoot floaters in the lane, or force help defense and make the right pass. Like I mentioned, everyone else on the Mavs can shoot, so all Felton has to do is get by his guy and make the right pass to have an impact.
With that said, the “getting by his guy” aspect of that scenario seems a tad far-fetched at this point of Felton’s career. Yet, if there’s anywhere that Felton can have impact, it’s in the pick-and-roll game, which the Mavericks use plenty of with Dirk Nowitzki, Brendan Wight, and Chandler.
Although Carlisle likes to use a deep rotation to keep his guys fresh and perpetuate the ‘Next Man Up’ mentality, like the San Antonio Spurs, Felton isn’t going to break into the rotation without injuries to Ellis, Nelson, Harris, and Barea. It’s not like Felton is a better defender than any of those four guys, and I don’t see Carlisle breaking up an already great situation to try to accommodate a player like Felton.
With ten Mavs seeing more than 11 minutes of playing time per game, that bench has got to be awfully cold with so many bodies getting action on the court, waiting at the scorer’s table. Luckily, Dallas now has Felton back to make sure that seat is nice and toasty for Dirk in the fourth quarter of another blowout victory.