DALLAS – Apparently, that 19-point lead the Dallas Mavericks built against the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night wasn’t large enough.
The Mavs, unfortunately, couldn’t sustain the margin and wound up losing to the Spurs, 105-101, before a sellout crowd of 20,214 at American Airlines Center. It was the fifth loss in the last seven games for the Mavericks and dropped their record to 20-24.
Despite leading most of the way, when the game was still there for the taking, the Mavs couldn’t make a critical basket, couldn’t get a key stop and failed to corral any crucial loose balls.
“We knew they were going to keep playing hard — that’s what they do,” forward Dirk Nowitzki said. “We knew they were going to somehow crawl back in it.
“Just down the stretch a couple of too many mistakes, a couple of turnovers, we missed a couple of good looks, we left too many shooters in the fourth quarter.”
All of that transpired into the Mavs going 0-2 on this brief home stand before they open a two-game road trip Saturday in Indiana.
The Spurs didn’t even take their first lead of the game – at 82-80 – until the outset of the fourth quarter. And once they got the lead, they kept putting pressure on the Mavericks until a LaMarcus Aldridge tip-in with 1:07 remaining gave the Spurs an insurmountable 101-96 lead.
Wesley Matthews’ 3-pointer got the Mavs within 101-99 of the Spurs. But DeRozan connected on a pull-up 20-footer which padded San Antonio’s lead to 103-99 with just 36.8 seconds remaining, and Luka Doncic and Matthews each missed 3-pointers down the stretch.
“NBA teams makes run – teams that fall behind generally make some kind of run,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “We kept it around 15 and got into the (halftime) locker room at 11 (56-45).
“We knew they were going to come out in the second half with a lot of force, which they did. And we didn’t play with enough force on our end.”
Donicic led the Mavs with 25 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, Matthews tallied 13 points, Dorian Finney-Smith scored 12, and Harrison Barnes added 11 points, although he was just 4-of-18 from the field.
“Over the course of the season you have to be process-oriented,” Carlisle said of the shots Barnes took. “He had a lot of good threes tonight that were on-line, or hit the back of the rim.
“He and Luka are our two main guys to go to for scoring. We’re going to ride those guys.”
The Spurs (26-20) rode the play of their bench to the winner’s circle. With DeRozan struggling to get 14 points and Aldridge finishing a foul-plagued night with just eight points, the Spurs’ bench outscored their Mavs’ counterparts, 51-36.
That includes 17 points from Marco Belinelli, 14 from Patty Mills and 12 from Davis Bertans. Add that to the 24 points the Spurs got from the 14 turnovers the Mavs committed, it’s easy to see why Dallas had issues holding onto that 23-4 lead they mounted with 4:33 left in the first quarter.
“There’s always some leads in the first half, but teams are usually always crawling back in,” said Dirk Nowitzki, who collected six points and four rebounds in 10 minutes. “It’s usually very rare that the team runs away with the lead from the first half.”
That certainly was the case for the Mavericks on Wednesday night.