January 11th - New Orleans Pelicans @ Dallas Mavericks - 4-5
Steven Adams listed as questionable for Dallas game https://t.co/97fyAb8Kau
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) January 10, 2021
Okay so, I'm posting this thread but I am doing so tentatively because, frankly, I have no idea if this game is going to go ahead or not. As of right now, the Mavericks are missing
- Kristaps Porzingis
- Dorian Finney-Smith
- Maxi Kleber
- Josh Richardson
- Jalen Brunson
due to, amongst other things, COVID protocols and regulations. As you know, the NBA requires teams to have at least 8 guys ready to play for any game to go ahead, and this number of people out at the moment means the Mavericks are on that borderline; with the way COVID spreads and the massive risk of all the travelling and meeting and such, do not be surprised if this game gets postponed the way that Miami/Boston did last night, and if it does go ahead, do not be surprised if we end up having some guys being forced into isolation and quarantine in the days following.
Now, because of this, there's a little more hope for us than might be expected when just looking purely at the records of each team. Dallas have won 4 of their last 5, and 3 straight, but they're also now about five minutes away from asking Rick Carlisle to suit up at SG, so who knows?
We've been disappointing recently. Not, actually, in terms of overall performance but we've lost three consecutive games pretty much entirely in the clutch; those final 5 minutes of the game are killing us right now. If we want any hope of coming out of this hellish road-trip in any sort of reasonable shape, these are the sorts of games that we will have to steal. If we win tonight, we get back up to .500 and knock the Mavs down to .500 in a tie with us. That's a decent position to be in.
So let's go out and try and play cohesively for once, for a full 48 minutes.