The Dallas Mavericks celebrated their fourth win in a row in a shootout against the New Orleans Pelicans. At 143: 130 the records tumble, among others Luka Doncic sets a new career record with 46 points. On the Pelicans side, Zion Williamson delivers an almost perfect game.
Dallas Mavericks (13-14) – New Orleans Pelicans (11-14) 143:130
In the Young Stars game, it was also the players with the most famous names who did a large part of the scoring. Doncic set a new career record with 46 points at 17/30 from the field and 5/8 from Downtown and distributed 12 assists. The 21-year-old is already at the start of his third season in seven games with at least 40 points and 10 assists, no other player in a Mavericks jersey has ever reached these marks at the same time.
Kristaps Porzingis also made his best game of the season with 36 points, 8 of his 13 threesomes went through the net. As a team, the Mavericks showed their best performance of the season from a distance, Dallas had not yet celebrated 25 hits (out of 45 attempts, 55.6 percent). The Mavs also hit 58 percent of their field throws.
However, the home team also needed offensive fireworks as they never found an answer against Williamson. The sophomore hit his first twelve throws from the field and set a new franchise record for the Pelicans for the most hits without a miss at the start of a game. Williamson hit all of his 14 throws in the zone and scored 36 points. Brandon Ingram also cracked the 30-point mark (11/23 FG, 4/9 3P), but had a weaker second half.
The Pelicans were able to counter good throwing rates (53.3 percent from the field, 45.9 percent from the triple line), both teams made hardly any mistakes offensively (9 turnover for NOLA, only 6 for Dallas). Dorian Finney-Smith (14 points, 4/5 3P), Josh Richardson (11, 6 assists) and Jalen Brunson (13, 4/5 FG, 6 rebounds, 7 assists) achieved double-digit points for Dallas, Maxi Kleber (6 points, 6 rebounds in 37 minutes) was mainly defensive in demand, but could not even affect Williamson with his four fouls.
Porzingis starts hot, Zion never gets cold – Doncic surpasses everything
At the beginning of the game it quickly became clear that the two star duos had big plans. Ingram (10) and Williamson (4) scored the first 14 points for the Pels, Porzingis sank four of his first five threes in less than six minutes. The Pelicans secured a 34:27 lead with an 18: 6 run at the end of the quarter, also because KP cooled off and awarded four threes in a row.
At the beginning of the second quarter, Doncic (15 in the section) took over the offense of the Mavs for the first time after a quiet first quarter (2 counters), who quickly closed the gap and all Pels except Williamson, who not only made Porzingis look bad, could brake something. With his seventh assist of the first half, Doncic found Porzingis on the triple line, who hit his sixth triple on the eleventh attempt (23 points) at halftime of 69:65 for the Mavs.
Doncic only needed five minutes to score 13 points after the break, which allowed Dallas to pull away to +12. Williamson wanted to match the Mavericks (19/32 threesome at this point), but missed his first throw from the field but from the triple line, NOLA only came closer at the end of the quarter (101: 108), as Williamson got the three points won several times per possession with an and-one near the basket.
In the final section, Pels coach Stan van Gundy relied on a zone defense, but – unsurprisingly – could not stop the Mavs’ rain of three. The guests could not bring the deficit under ten points, Doncic and Porzingis were simply too good offensive. Dallas won the fourth game in a row.
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