Throughout this postseason, there have been moments that summon a sort of Proustian memory of NBA playoffs past. The strongest foothold on our collective basketball memory left standing, however, isn’t so much a moment as it is an idea whose time … still hasn’t quite arrived. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” T.S. Eliot wrote more than a century ago. “His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” The beleaguered bewilderment in Luka Doncic’s eyes by the end of Game 2 against the Boston Celtics was the look of fatigue in the face of an overwhelming threat on the verge of history. I recognized that look. It was the look of James Harden, six years ago, at the end of the Houston Rockets’ crushing Game 7 loss to the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference finals—one of the biggest what-ifs in modern basketball.
These Dallas Mavericks, on the ropes down 0-2 in the 2024 NBA Finals, in style and spirit, embody the ghost of that 2017-18 Rockets team, arguably the best ever to not reach the Finals. Doncic came into the league less than a month after the Rockets’ untimely collapse and, like Harden in Houston, endured fits and starts before finding clarity in his sixth season on the team playing alongside an offensive genius seeking a new lease on his career in his 30s. Call it an inheritance of destiny, a transmigration of an unreconciled soul.
That 2017-18 Rockets team, entirely defined by the codominant coexistence of Harden and Chris Paul, was a revelation. It was a 65-win team (a win total surpassed by only 17 teams in history) that at one point won 17 games in a row (surpassed by only 11). It was the league’s most efficient offense with the best net rating. Houston played 45 regular-season games with Harden, Paul, and primary roll man Clint Capela on the floor together; it won 42 of those games. This was simply a different brand of basketball. It was hooping on the edge of Occam’s razor. It was Doomsday Preppers: Moreyball Edition. It was building the plane entirely out of Synergy’s leaguewide percentile grades on scoring efficiency. Remember the feeling you got watching Luka’s stepback over Rudy Gobert set to Bad Bunny’s “Monaco”? Imagine that, but chopped and screwed over and over on a 19,755-minute loop.
It was the most cynical conception I’ve ever seen of what basketball could be: just about every possession intentionally involving Harden and/or Paul navigating a ball screen to take advantage of a mismatch on a switch, with the rest of the team—front office and coaching staff included—placing an irresponsible degree of trust in, admittedly, two of the smartest shot creators the game has ever known. It was a lot of dribbling. (So much dribbling.) It was … riveting, in a way? Maybe not conventionally beautiful, but hypnotic in its rondo, compelling in its utter insistence. As a lifelong Mike D’Antoni zealot, I recognize the “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns to be D’Antoni’s most prevailing contribution to the basketball culture, but those 2017-18 Rockets were arguably his greatest triumph. It was not a limitless, free-flowing offense; there were very clear limits with a defined stream pattern. Nonetheless, it was close to unstoppable with all the pieces in place. There have been more sustainable winning formulas, there have been better assemblages of talent, but how many other half-baked ideas took a team to the brink of the NBA Finals? That it ultimately resulted in the most consecutive missed 3-pointers in a game in league history—27!—almost adds to the myth, in hindsight. Or at least that’s what I tell myself all these years later.
Those Rockets were built on a very specific idea of how to win in 2018. What the Mavs have built is a variation on a theme, albeit without such stark ideology. Instead of cynicism, Dallas has surrendered to a kind of mysticism: The team’s whims and trajectory are governed solely by the belief that Doncic cultivates. Unlike Harden, Doncic takes points wherever he can get them; unlike Paul, Kyrie Irving doesn’t need to have his arm twisted to start cooking. Regardless of impetus, some combinations just work. Doncic has always thrived playing alongside a fellow playmaker capable of shouldering a high usage, whether it be Jalen Brunson or Kyrie. Acquiring Dereck Lively II in last year’s draft and Daniel Gafford at this year’s trade deadline gave Dallas the lob threats that are a prerequisite for an offense built around the homing-device levels of touch that Doncic and Irving possess. The separate deadline acquisition of P.J. Washington gave the Mavericks a versatile power athlete with some ability to create for himself on the second side—a melding of the posts held by the likes of Eric Gordon, P.J. Tucker, and Trevor Ariza in Houston back then. Like the Rockets before them, the Mavericks are powered by the attention that Doncic and Irving generate, often leading to lob attempts and corner 3s. It’s a blueprint that has gotten them this far. But after two games, the Celtics have cordoned off Dallas’s preferred scoring avenues by following the same strategy that the Warriors used against the Rockets six years ago.
“Our game plan was to let James Harden do everything that he’s going to do,” Draymond Green said on the Old Man and the Three podcast in 2022. “We’re probably not going to stop him, and that’s fine, but we’re going to stop everyone else, and then James is going to get tired.”
Where every other playoff team that has played the Mavericks has had to throw multiple bodies at both Luka and Kyrie, the Celtics’ fleet of elite individual defenders has allowed them to stay with their assignments and keep from overleveraging any rotations. The lack of fear that Boston has for the Mavericks’ supporting cast from behind the arc has given the Celtics license to stray a step or two farther away from the perimeter in order to collectively wall off the paint and present looming threats on help defense. It’s that extra split second of recognition that has hampered Irving in the series thus far—there is a slight hesitance in his movement that has turned normally fruitful isolations into dead ends. Irving has, for so long, danced along an astral plane unconcerned with time or his surroundings, suspending himself in air for an extra beat or two to finish around the rim. Against these Celtics, you’re constantly reminded that he’s almost always the smallest player on the court. Without his explosive scoring, Dallas’s formula is thrown entirely off balance, just as it was for Houston. Six years ago, the Rockets bet on Harden and Paul’s ability to obliterate the average team’s defensive constitution—every team had a weak link. There was always a player to hunt. Unfortunately for Dallas, six years later, it’s not at all apparent who that player is on the Celtics.
The unanswerable question in 2018 was how history might have changed if CP3 hadn’t hurt his hamstring in Game 5, sidelining him for the rest of the series after the Rockets took a 3-2 lead against the reigning champs. Houston carried double-digit leads in both potential closeout games but petered out by the end. Fatigue had set in for Harden, who dribbled 600 times in Game 7. Without Paul, the disparity in firepower between Harden and a team that featured Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Klay Thompson became too apparent. “Our talent took over,” coach Steve Kerr said after the series-clinching win. “It’s as simple as that. We’ve got three of the best shotmakers in the league.”
Those Warriors and these Celtics, with their indisputable strength in numbers, will always serve as a sort of existential threat to heliocentric offenses like Harden’s Rockets or Luka’s Mavericks. In their bounty of playmaking options, the constraints of a system built squarely on the shoulders of two creators become more and more apparent. (Especially when one is not pulling his weight.) The game is not just the game when one team appears weightless and the other taxed with labor. Luka’s turnaround midrange fadeaway is beautiful. It’s also a lifeline propping up the entire offense as things stand. Players are happy to station in the corners until it no longer yields the success it used to. Faith erodes, systems fail. “I think we’re very close, obviously,” D’Antoni said after Game 7. “You know, some things we’ll tweak and we’ll get back on the horse and we’ll get these guys here pretty soon.” The Rockets ran it back the following year. They faced the Warriors in the second round. They lost; the total point margin across six games: 11 points. Trades were demanded, and that was that. A second-chance opportunity at the summit is never promised.
Luka and Kyrie will have to make the most out of the one they have here back home in Dallas. Perhaps the best-case scenario for the Mavs going forward is for the series to play out like 2018 in reverse: Hope that Kyrie’s first two games as a nonentity are obstacles in the rearview rather than an absence that dooms the series at the very end. An offensive talent of Irving’s caliber can’t be shut out entirely, can he? The Mavericks won’t be able to dictate the terms of engagement (rather than scrambling to keep up) until he returns to form. Entering the series, it seemed a consensus that Dallas had only two of the eight best players in the series. And given how the Celtics have manipulated the floor to take a rim deterrent like Lively out of the picture, Boston probably has the series’ five best defenders, too.
Taken on its face, that numbers game ought to be insurmountable. But if this Mavs run has been powered by Luka Magic-al thinking, it’s too late to surrender that mentality. If anything, they’ll have to lean into it. Luka has overcome a 0-2 series deficit before; Kyrie’s done it in the Finals. For years, we’ve watched Doncic’s prodigious talent fill—and shatter—every container he’s been placed into. But to crack the bottle that the Celtics have jammed the Mavericks into? To paraphrase Kyrie after Game 2, it’ll be the hardest thing he’s ever done.
