Mavericks Series +300????

[ACE730]

Thinking about pulling the trigger. Mavs have disappointed me nearly every year. But they have some good matchups in this series. If New Orleans could win 2 games with essentially 2-3 players is it too much to expect the mavs depth to cause la some issues?? I think the zone defense gives the Lakers some problems as well. Thoughts???

[Keith]

I like the Mavs--they could beat this Lakers team.

[BOBBYW]

I like it...Thanx & gl

[Romanowski]

negative

[sticktwo]

gl tonight

[The Frozen Pond]

Originally Posted by ACE730

Thinking about pulling the trigger. Mavs have disappointed me nearly every year. But they have some good matchups in this series. If New Orleans could win 2 games with essentially 2-3 players is it too much to expect the mavs depth to cause la some issues?? I think the zone defense gives the Lakers some problems as well. Thoughts???

Lakers-Mavs Preview: Dallas’ Zone vs. Los Angeles
May 2nd, 2011 Sebastian Pruiti

When you talk about the Dallas Mavericks and their defense, you can’t help but bring up their zone defense. This is because they ran the zone 10.5% of the time, and had so much success with it, holding opponents to just 0.881 points per possession when they went up against Dallas’ zone.

Also, I am bringing this up because you should expect to see some zone tonight, because in each of the three games against the Lakers, the Mavericks have played zone, specifically, the Mavericks played 21 possessions of zone. We all know about the Lakers’ struggle against the zone last year in their series with the Phoenix Suns, but the Lakers are a decent zone team, scoring 0.968 points per possession against the zone during the regular season. In fact, against the Mavericks’ zone, the Lakers have been even more successful, scoring 28 points in those 21 possessions, good for a PPP of 1.33.

In my opinion, one of the reasons why the Lakers were so successful against Dallas’ zone is because they always seemed prepared for it, not getting caught of guard, and not having many possessions of simply passing it around the outside (which is what happened against Phoenix last playoffs). So what was Los Angeles’ strategy? The wanted to get the ball in the paint (the underbelly of the zone), and to do so they used cuts off of the basketball, with most of them coming out of their triangle offense:

The end result of all of these plays are shots in the paint. This really goes to show you that when the Lakers are determined to run their stuff, no matter against zone or man, they can have success.