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In the grand scheme of sports disasters, collapses, mistakes, oversights and peculiarities, the past month or so of the Dallas Mavericks stands out. It didn’t get better on Wednesday.
A month after trading Luka Dončić, three weeks after losing Anthony Davis to injury and a day after losing Kyrie Irving for the season, the Mavericks lost 137-107 to the Milwaukee Bucks. It was their fourth loss in their past five games.
Before the game, however, Mavericks coach Jason Kidd responded to speculation that the team’s own decision-making contributed to Irving going down. Over the previous six weeks, Irving led the NBA in minutes per game with 38.7, most of which were played after he became the team’s offensive centerpiece following the Dončić trade.
That included five straight games with at least 40 minutes immediately after the trade. Via the AP, Kidd called the injury a “freak accident” and complaining about “conspiracy theories,” insisting Irving wanted the workload:
“He invited that,” Kidd said. “He wanted that. But are we reporting that? Are we? No, we’re not reporting that. We’re reporting that we’re running someone into the ground. That’s not true. That’s his job, is to play. And he loves to play.
“And it’s all right to play 40 minutes at the age of 32, in a month’s span. This isn’t the whole season, right? I think sometimes we’re taking things a little bit too far, or we’re not really telling the truth because we want the likes or the hearts, or we want somebody to put us up on this platform of not telling the whole truth. Because it was a freak accident. It happened early in the game. We should be promoting our athletes, our players to play more minutes and play more games, but are we? Probably not.”
Irving is 32 years old and has faced regular injuries in his career. It is Kidd’s job to say no if a player wants a workload he doesn’t think is sustainable.
Shorthanded Mavericks blown out by Bucks
There was no drama to the loss. Dallas was down double-digits by the end of the first quarter, down by 19 at halftime and down by as much as 35 in the second half. Klay Thompson, the…
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Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2025-03-06 03:17:00
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