The game clock inside Ball Arena in Denver showed more than seven minutes remained until the start of the third quarter on Sunday night. The halftime act had cleared out, and the court was empty. Except for one solitary player. Klay Thompson had come out early from the locker room to put up shots. After a torrid start to his career as a Maverick, he is looking to rediscover his rhythm on his new team as he prepares to play his old team for the first time. On Tuesday night, Thompson will make his much-anticipated return to the Bay Area, where he enjoyed so much success in his career, a key part of the Warriors’ four championships. Captain hats will be tipped, and emotions will run high.
After declaring the Mavs were “a Klay away,” Nico Harrison went out and signed the free-agent sharpshooter in the offseason. The Mavs have gotten off to an inconsistent start to the season due to injuries, poor starts to games and cold shooting from deep. The homecoming aside, the national spotlight will be on Thompson on Tuesday night for a variety of reasons: his impact on the roster, what we have seen in the first 10 games, and what that might mean for the rest of the season.
In his first three games, Thompson scored 22, 19 and 18 points on a steady diet of open looks. So open, in fact, that Luka Doncic knew one of Thompson’s franchise-record six threes in a Mavs debut was going in before he even shot it. This is what he was brought here for. As defenses keyed on stopping Doncic and Kyrie Irving, Thompson would get quality shots. And early on, he hit them. Of his first 33 three-point attempts, 29 were considered open (defender is 4 to 6 feet away) or wide open (6-plus feet away). In his first three games, he was putting up 11 treys a game and hitting them at a 46 percent rate.
Guess what? Defenses adjusted. After that hot start, defenders stopped helping off of him. Defenses also keyed in on taking away the lob the Mavericks have been so successful with. The combination of those two strategies made the isolation game in the Doncic-big man pick-and-roll the optimal play. The Mavs are taking what defenses are giving them. Defenses have been willing to give up a two and then go shoot a three on the other end, counting on winning the math game. With Doncic not playing in the preseason, it took time to find his rhythm and shots he normally makes were not going in. Poor starts became common. The Mavs are scoring the second-most points in the league in isolation. Correspondingly, distribution is down—Dallas ranks last leaguewide in passes per game. When the shots aren’t falling, the offense can look static and out of sync.
A cursory look at the state of the offense would seem to indicate a drop in Thompson’s production, but that’s too simplistic. His gravity opens up space for others as he tilts the court. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, one of the Magic’s best perimeter defenders, was assigned to him. Thompson is being smothered, and he’s not getting those open looks.
The best indicator of whether a jump shot will go in is how tightly it is defended. This is why you see players shoot from well behind the three-point line. The attempt might be from farther away, but if the defender can’t get all the way out to contest, there is a better chance the shot falls for the great shooters.
The tight defense he’s seeing has affected his accuracy, of course. In fact, a whopping 14 percent of his attempts from deep come against tight coverage, in which a defender is 2 to 4 feet away (Doncic, who faces the second-highest percentage of tight coverage, only deals with those looks on 7 percent of his three-point attempts.) Thompson is shooting 17 percent against those tight coverages. The number surges to 44 percent on wide open looks.
So, how to get him more open looks? Force help off of him. As the team’s pick-and-roll efficiency improves and Doncic punishes single coverage, defenses will be forced to trap Doncic and Irving and sag off of Thompson. This is what made the Celtics so deadly when Dallas ran into them in the NBA Finals: if you send help, someone else will hurt you. Getting Thompson involved early and in transition will also help. The Mavs can tear some pages from the Warriors’ playbook on how to get him going.
There’s better news on the other side of the ball. A key question heading into the season was what Thompson’s impact would be on the defensive end, as defense was essential to the Mavs’ run in the last quarter of last season and in the journey to the NBA Finals. How would swapping the uber-athletic Derrick Jones Jr. for Thompson affect play at that end of the court? Through the first 10 games, Cleaning the Glass (its numbers take out garbage time) has Thompson lineups with a 110.2 defensive rating, ranking the Mavs ninth in the league, exactly where they stand overall. He has taken on difficult assignments and stayed in front of his man. To start the Denver game, he was assigned to Jamaal Murray. The Mavs are plus-8 with Thompson on the court, fourth-best on the team. It bears watching to see if he can maintain that level of performance throughout the regular season and into the playoffs. But so far, he’s delivered everything Dallas could have hoped for defensively.
Fairly or not, the spotlight will be squarely on Thompson in his first game in Chase Center wearing an opposing jersey. It doesn’t change the fact that the Captain is attempting to steer his ship in new waters, or that such an acclimation takes time. Thompson admitted to having nerves heading into his first games as a Maverick. He has also acknowledged that finding his rhythm with his new team could take up to 30 games. The goal is for the team to be playing its best basketball come mid-April. What he has done in his first 10 games or what happens on Tuesday night does not change the blueprint.
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