Fans of the Utah Jazz may look to the Dallas Mavericks and wish they rostered (with all due respect to Donovan Mitchell) a player as transcendent as Luka Doncic. On the flip side, Mavs fans likely cover virtually every other facet of the Jazz as a team. The term “heliocentric offense” wasn’t invented to describe the Mavericks under Doncic, but frankly, it might as well have been. He led the entire NBA in usage last season at 36%. With such a deep reserve of quality veterans populating the Utah Jazz roster, it’s difficult to imagine that Head Coach Quin Snyder will afford any single Jazzman such a generous slice of the team’s offensive pie.
Meanwhile, Doncic’s usage is borne out of both ability and necessity. Without putting the cart before the horse, we’ll just say that Mavericks are not flush with ball-handlers, and elaborate on that point later.
Luka Doncic appears to be a special, generational talent, but is he generational enough to overcome what otherwise might appear to be deficiencies in the Dallas Mavericks compared to the Utah Jazz heading into the 2021-22 season? In this article, we’ll compare the two Western Conference clubs on the basis of offense, defense and roster construction.
Hopefully, we’ll gain some clarity on how they match up in the process.