Give the Mavericks their free throws. All 29 of them. They were the product of 35 attempts and good shooting at the line, and they helped keep Dallas competitive on a night when too many jumpers missed. Sacramento made only 10. In a game with ordinary perimeter numbers, that would be a handsome head start.
Monday’s 115-100 Kings win at American Airlines Center made for a rather different accounting exercise. The scoring came in three columns. Dallas gained 19 points at the line and two on baskets inside the arc.
Sacramento collected an extra 36 from three-pointers. Add up those differences and there is your margin. The Kings could concede an awful lot of work at the stripe because their own scoring from farther away paid so well.
There is a trap in calling this an interior-versus-perimeter game. Dallas had 40 points in the paint to Sacramento’s 38, so the Mavericks did get respectable work done close to the rim. Count all two-point field goals, which include shots outside the paint, and the totals are still remarkably close: 25 baskets for Dallas, 24 for Sacramento.
The Kings could have won this game by overwhelming Dallas at the rim, but that is not how the points were distributed. They scored 57 beyond the arc. Dallas scored 21 there.
The most useful part of Dallas’ free-throw advantage was that it kept a poor shooting performance from devouring everything else. Cooper Flagg made all 11 of his foul shots on a night when only three of his 19 shots from the field went down. Walter Clayton Jr. was perfect on four attempts and made four threes as well.
The Mavericks were able to get those contributions on the same night that Daniel Gafford made nine of 10 shots. That is a substantial amount of good work to find in a 15-point loss, and it explains why Dallas stayed close for much of the game.
Take Clayton’s fourth quarter. Two of his threes, separated by a Morez Johnson Jr. dunk, turned a 94-79 deficit into 94-87. That stretch is the best argument against writing off the Dallas offense as a failure from beginning to end.
It found an efficient combination at a time when the score made every missed chance expensive. Clayton’s ability to get points in more than one way was particularly useful. There is no reason to discount that because the opponent had the better finish.
The problem was what Sacramento could do to the gap while Dallas was building that response. The Kings made 19 of 43 from outside. The volume is part of the story; the fact that they made a higher share of those attempts than Dallas makes the comparison more painful.
