During their first-round playoff series loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, the Dallas Mavericks were the Luka Doncic show and little else consistently. Doncic faded late in games under the weight of that workload, as perhaps expected. Kristaps Porzingis is ideally the third-best player on a good team, with Tim Hardaway Jr. in a similar vein.
Mark Cuban, the ever-involved and routinely optimistic Mavericks’ owner, spoke about multiple topics with The Daily Beast recently. Of course the basketball team was among the topics. More specifically, Cuban spoke about what the Mavericks need around Doncic.
We need a secondary ball handler with some size. KP will spread the court, make threes, is a great cutter, and block shots. Luka will create. We’ve got shooters with Tim and Trey [Burke] and Maxi [Kleber] and others. But we need someone to take the pressure off of Luka, so instead of him having to have the ball in his hands for 40 minutes, it could be 32 minutes, and that’s what we need.
During the regular season, Doncic had a league-high 36 percent usage rate. In the series against the Clippers, his usage rate bumped up to 39.1 percent. That latter number is Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City without Kevin Durant territory.
Moving Doncic off the ball would be an intriguing thing. Since the ball is in his hands so much, he scores unassisted most of the time and he basically never shoots corner-3s. His simply being able to move around off the ball more would open up possibilities and attack angles for the Mavericks’ offense.
NBA teams need multiple stars to be a serious title contender. The Mavericks will be on the hunt for a second star to pair with Doncic. It’s just a matter of paying off the pursuit, and finding someone to take some of the ball handling load off their young star.
READ MORE: NBA Rumors: 5 teams who need to go all-out and trade for a star
