Two years ago, it was the Dallas Mavericks who, following two years of first-round playoff losses, catapulted to their first Western Conference finals on the heels of a seven-game upset over a championship contender. It was Luka Doncic—in his fourth season, like Anthony Edwards is now—who had a bouncy, vivacious, coming-of-age quality to his game, finding new depths in his bag on every play. It was Doncic, intoxicated by the jubilant mania of his own growing command, who f*cked around with an aging but dangerous superstar guard and found out. And it was Doncic who had never been this deep into the postseason and who, exhausted and coming off an injury, discovered the limits of his problem-solving at the hands of an experienced, smart, variable, physical Warriors defense that went on to win a championship.
In the two years since, Doncic has taken heliocentrism and adapted and elevated its form by integrating Kyrie Irving, one of basketball’s great high-difficulty, high-leverage shotmakers, into his grand designs. It is far too early to crown the Mavericks after a nail-biting Game 1 victory (their first in the Jason Kidd era) that portends a long, back-and-forth series. But it was impossible not to notice: Edwards is in the midst of learning to make the kinds of reads that Doncic has now made thousands of times. Through most of the game, Edwards took what the defense gave him. Doncic took what he wanted from the defense.
While Irving kept the Mavericks offense afloat in the first half, Doncic—in the face of doubles, traps, and drop coverage at varying levels—looked for ways to solve it. His experiments weren’t without their blunders: missed reads, forced lob passes to Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively II, drive-and-kick turnovers, and passed-up layups. But eventually, they culminated in precision playmaking. In the second half, Doncic and Irving created lob after lob, attacking Rudy Gobert in drop coverage.
In the space between now and Game 2, much will be made about the virtues of dropping versus blitzing—tactical and existential fodder about Gobert’s viability in a series that promises to be heavy on perimeter pick-and-roll creation—but the simple fact of the matter is that Doncic can blow any pick-and-roll coverage into smithereens. Here he is in the second quarter, finding Gafford for a wide-open dunk off the blitz.
And the moment he sees a coverage he doesn’t like, he’s more than willing to wipe it away with the dismissive flick of a wrist. In crunch time, when Lively turned the ball over on a travel after Doncic was blitzed, Wonder Boy turned Chess Master and waved off the screen on the next play, going mano a mano with Jaden McDaniels, nailing a stepback 2, and capping off a 15-point fourth quarter with split-second tactical wizardry that Edwards is just starting to grasp.
On a night when Edwards didn’t have the legs to reject screens or explode through defenders, he did make some forceful strategic forays with his playmaking. Take, for example, the way he slowly figured out how to punish the Mavericks for loading onto him off the weakside corner and repeatedly unfurled one-handed skip passes that aren’t a part of his everyday repertoire.
In the first quarter, with Lively on the switch, he airmailed a pass to the corner over the big man’s 7-foot-5 wingspan, right into the stands.
Later in the quarter, Edwards dribbled into the teeth of the defense, found a cleaner angle, and whipped a one-handed crosscourt pass to Karl-Anthony Towns, who was so surprised by the strategic exploit that he had to backpedal after he had begun a cut to the basket:
In the second quarter, Edwards was more demanding. In one play, he asked for the ball back after Lively switched onto him, and in another he waved off a screen from McDaniels to get Lively’s man to set it instead. The defense, as he predicted, scrunched in to protect the big, and in both instances, Edwards whipped the ball to the corner for a 3.
It was both impressive and alarming just how cerebral Edwards had to be. Taking 12 of his 16 shots beyond the arc (and nailing five), Edwards looked more like a 39-year-old LeBron James trying to preserve his energy than a 22-year-old upstart. At the six-minute mark of the fourth quarter, after picking off a transition Hail Mary by Doncic, Edwards seemed to run out of gas. For the Mavericks, the pass was a mistake that served their grander scheme of wearing out Edwards and the Wolves.
“They were coming off a grueling Game 7,” Irving told ESPN in his walk-off interview, “so we wanted to make sure we pushed the pace.”
Edwards, who, after surviving Denver, boldly pronounced he’d be guarding Irving, miscalculated his own stamina. Irving mercilessly drove at Edwards in the first half, especially in transition, an assertion of oldhead pride that dovetailed beautifully with the Mavericks’ game plan.
Edwards, exhausted, was in but not of the Timberwolves’ late-game offense, which imploded without his command. “We was just a step behind everybody, especially myself. Kyrie got a transition layup. I think we scored and he just outran me and I was just exhausted, but we’ll be all right,” said Edwards, with the coy, knowing smile and cool mystique that have turned him into the postseason’s most charismatic character and allowed him to churn losses into lessons at a staggering rate.
If it’s true that you learn more from failure than you do from success, the Timberwolves should feel good going into Game 2, and the Mavericks should feel good about the series. Anthony Edwards is evolving in response to the scouting report, but Luka Doncic has mastered it.
