The Dallas Mavericks were riding a three-game winning streak when they face the bottom-feeding Houston Rockets last night. In the paper, Rick Carlisle’s team should’ve gotten an easy win, especially with Kristaps Porzingis back after a two-game absence.
The Latvian big man was on a tear since the start of the game. Kelly Olynyk and Christian Wood couldn’t do much to stop him, yet the Mavs spent the whole 48 minutes playing catchup.
Dallas made a strong push late in the fourth quarter and had a chance to take the game to overtime. However, they turned their backs from Porzingis despite riding a hot hand, and he didn’t take a single shot for 7 minutes in the final period of the game.
More worryingly, when asked about it, the former New York Knicks star seemingly took a shot at his coach for the way the game unfolded:
“Good question. It’s just the plays we were running. Happened before also,” a clearly upset Porzingis replied.
Kristaps Porzingis was the Mavs’ most efficient starter in tonight’s loss — 23 points (10-19 FG) — but he didn’t take a shot in 7 mins in Q4.
His answer when @espn_macmahon asked: “Good question. It’s just the plays we were running. Happened before also.” pic.twitter.com/lSpre6RrvG
— Callie Caplan (@CallieCaplan) April 8, 2021
Clearly, Porzingis would like to be more involved in the team’s offense down the stretch. Needless to say, most of the touches go through Luka Doncic when the game is on the line.
Porzingis has done an outstanding job of embracing a somewhat lesser role at Dallas and taking a step back to Doncic and the Mavs were playing pretty good basketball before this strange loss. So, hopefully, this will be just an isolated comment and he’ll get in the same page with his coach as they head towards the most important part of the season.
