MIAMI — When the 2022-23 schedule came out last summer, the Mavericks organization mentally circled this late-season stop.
It wasn’t because Saturday night’s game against the Heat in Miami-Dade Arena offered a reprieve of any sort. Or because this would be a matchup of reigning conference finalists — Dallas from the West, longtime nemesis Miami from the East.
Mostly it was about getting a rare two-day, pre-playoffs break in a nice city and a posh hotel overlooking Biscayne Bay and an opportunity for significant others to meet players and staff here.
What no one foresaw was that when the Mavericks journeyed here for this third game of a four-game trip that the season’s Grim Reaper would leer over their collective shoulder the entire stay.
“Obviously the rankings don’t look great,” forward Maxi Kleber said after Friday’s practice at Theodore Gibson Park Gymnasium. “But we’ve just got to do our job, have good practices, improve and stay together as a team.”
With five games remaining the 11th-place Mavericks (37-40) have all but run out of time and opportunities to improve.
Playoffs? As Jim Mora famously said, “Playoffs? Don’t talk about playoffs. You kiddin’ me?”
Entering Friday night’s games, the Mavericks, according to basketballreference.com’s daily playoff probabilities report, had a 0.4% chance of finishing sixth in the Western Conference, which would mean assuring themselves a playoff berth and avoiding the seventh-through-10th place play-in tournament.
Furthermore, the probabilities report, which is based on 10,000 simulations of the rest of the season, gave Dallas only a 1.7% chance of finishing seventh and 5.9% odds of finishing eighth.
Which is another way of saying Dallas’ only realistic avenues to the play-in tournament are to finish ninth (14.7% odds) or 10th (22.4%). Overall, basketballreference gives Dallas a 45% chance of making the play-in, which isn’t favorable, but it’s a chance nonetheless.
To have any realistic chance of getting the No. 9 or No. 10 play-in spot, the Mavericks most likely need to win at least four out of their remaining five games and hope for a stumble by at least one of the teams immediately in front of them in the standings: Oklahoma City, the Lakers, New Orleans and Minnesota.
“We know where we realistically are,” guard Kyrie Irving said, “and our destiny is in some other teams’ hands losing games.”
Irving was the last Maverick to leave Gibson Park gym Friday, staying after to go through his shooting regimen with assistant God Shammgod as the rest of the team bused back to the hotel.
“When you talk about Kai’s ability to win, he’s teaching,” coach Jason Kidd said. “He’s leading. He’s trying to help. He’s trying to do everything on and off the court. He’s been a true pro.”
Irving had 23 points and five assists in Wednesday’s 116-108 loss at Philadelphia, a game Dallas led by as many as 12 points and by five with a minute left in the third quarter.
That Dallas team is the one that must show during the final five games, not the Mavericks team that mustered 17 points and committed six turnovers in the fourth quarter against the Sixers.
The problem is that Saturday and Sunday’s opponents on the road, Miami and Atlanta, are seventh and eighth in the East and pushing to avoid the play-in tournament.
“We had a couple of games where we played well for a solid amount of time, but there were stretches where we play too loose or we had mental mistakes,” Kleber said. “Obviously, in the NBA against good teams, they’re going to take advantage of those moments.”
Kleber said he closely follows the standings and watches games on nights that the Mavericks aren’t playing, but during Dallas’ games he does no scoreboard peeking.
“Just focus on the game and focus on what you have to do to get the win,” he said. “Everything else is out of our control.”
What are Dallas’ chances of finishing 4-1 and at least making the season’s final days interesting?
Seemingly not great, considering the Mavericks have lost five of their last six; eight of their last 11; and 15 of their last 20. They haven’t had a 4-1 stretch since going 5-1 from Jan. 30 to Feb. 10.
This is what happens when you lose consecutive games to Charlotte. You leave yourself no margin for error.
You find yourself in sunny Miami with your season on the brink and, instead of gathering thoughts and energy for the playoffs, you wonder if your real vacation, unplanned, will start a little more than a week from now.
