It’s hard to blame people who think this was a team that was pretty good but just got hot at the right time, then found its level again. But in 2011, they were coming off four years of first and second round exists, and after 2011, they never again won a playoff series. In between, they won 50+ games eleven years in a row, then, after the strike, 41, then 49, then 50 again, then 42. They played their second to last, in 2015, against the James Harden Rockets. In the Dirk years, they won their first ever playoff series against the Stockton and Malone Jazz, in 2001, for all that both men were in their late 30s. If it weren’t for the Spurs, their longevity would be truly unbelievable. Obviously, in general, people know that the Mavericks were an excellent franchise. The reason is simple: it looks like a fluke. Unlike those Heat, however – unlike the Spurs, unlike the Lakers whose dynasty the Mavericks ended with their sweep – few people outside of Dallas number that 2011 team among the historically great. They ended the season, from March 10 th on, on a 15-3 run, then played all of fifteen playoff games before reaching the Finals, just as few as the Mavericks themselves. Between November 29 th and January 9 th they lost two games, both to – you guessed it – the Dallas Mavericks. They didn’t need seasoning, they were veterans – LeBron and Bosh were 26, Wade was 29 – and they were already burning up the league. Their dominance would be brought to an end only when LeBron left the next year, and they were every bit as good in 2011, despite what people say. The Heat won 58 games that year, would win the title the next two years, and lose again in the NBA Finals the next to another of the greatest squads of all-time – the incredible 2014 Spurs. Then, of course, they rebounded from a tough game one and nearly all of game two to beat perhaps one of top three or four collections of talent ever assembled, the first year of the LeBron-Wade-Bosh Heat. If the young Thunder still needed some seasoning – James Harden and Russell Westbrook were just 21, Kevin Durant just 22 – still they won 55 games, destroyed Carmelo Anthony’s Nuggets in five and made it past the profoundly dangerous Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol, Rudy Gay and Mike Conley, Tony Allen Grizzlies. They walked through a Thunder team, in five games, then near the height of their powers. They struggled a bit with a scrappy Trail Blazers team in the first round, a bad match up for them, but announced themselves by demolishing, in four games, a Lakers team that had won the last two championships and won just as many games that year as the year before, 57. The 2011 Mavericks were one of the greatest teams of all time, and they proved that in the playoffs.
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