Dallas Mavericks: Should the Mavs fear the play-in tournament?
By Duncan Smith
Reason No. 2 the Dallas Mavericks fear the play-in: Short-term variance
Playing a whole season (especially this season) just to get ousted if you have a couple of cold shooting games is a cruel fate. It’s reasonable to want to get as far away from short-term variance like that as you can, if you can.
The Dallas Mavericks are in the most favorable spot of the play-in candidates at the moment. Their 29-24 record places them in seventh, 2.0 games behind the sixth-place Portland Trail Blazers, and 1.5 games ahead of the eighth-place Memphis Grizzlies. Rounding out the play-in tier as it currently stands, they’re 2.5 games ahead of the San Antonio Spurs and 3.5 games ahead of the Golden State Warriors.
There are worse places to be if you have to be stuck in that tier, and they control their destiny more than any of the other three teams, but it’s easy to see why Cuban would regret that his team could be put in such a situation. After all, in almost any other year, the Mavs would simply be the seven seed with a big lead over non-playoff teams.