Christmas Day in the NBA is all about showcasing the best of the league, both future and present. No festive matchup represents that dichotomy better than the 5 p.m. ET game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Golden State Warriors. The hosting Warriors are a veteran squad led by 37-year-old Stephen Curry, while the visiting Mavericks’ marquee player is 19-year-old Cooper Flagg.
The hosts should have the health advantage: only Stephen’s brother Seth is out for Golden State, while Klay Thompson (knee), P.J. Washington (foot), Dwight Powell (illness), and Max Christie (illness) are all questionable for Dallas.
The Warriors are 8.5-point favorites at DraftKings Sportsbook (-340 on the Moneyline), and the point total is set to 228.5. The Mavericks are +270 on the Moneyline. Below, I’ll break down tonight’s highly-anticipated matchup and offer my prediction.
Dallas Mavericks at Golden State Warriors preview, prediction
Slowly but surely, the pieces are starting to come together for Dallas. Though the Mavericks have had a couple of not-so-good losses in recent weeks to the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Pelicans, they also picked up wins over the Detroit Pistons and Denver Nuggets, each a top-four seed in its conference. Flagg is coming off of arguably the best game of his career, a 33-point, nine-rebound, nine-assist masterpiece against Denver, and all in all, he’s averaging 25.1 points, 6.4 rebounds, and 4.3 assists per game across his last 11 appearances. With a clear franchise-changing prospect on the roster, anything else is gravy, but the fact that Anthony Davis is healthy and playing with his usual two-way force certainly doesn’t hurt.
Golden State has been much more up-and-down, but its 120-97 win over the Orlando Magic on Monday was pretty confidence-inspiring, even though the Magic didn’t have Franz Wagner, Jalen Suggs, or Tristan Da Silva. Like Dallas, the Warriors have plenty of questions — their starting lineup had been in flux all season before Steve Kerr finally settled on Curry, Jimmy Butler, Draymond Green, Moses Moody, and Quinten Post — but they have a consensus top-10 player in the world whose offensive gravity remains unmatched. By the composite metric RAPM, this has actually been Green’s second-best defensive season of his career.
Mavericks at Warriors pick, best bet
Per former Dallas general manager Nico Harrison, who was fired on November 11, “defense wins championships”. That adage holds some truth — six of the last seven champions have had a top-10 defense — even if neither of these teams is particularly likely to lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy. It should certainly win this game: both teams have a top-10 defense, as Golden State has the league’s third-best defensive rating and the Mavericks the ninth-best, though Dallas has slipped slightly to 20th so far this month. Offensively, both teams have bottom-10 units, though the Warriors have scored 3.7 more points per 100 possessions than the Mavericks have.
Golden State’s key will be to take advantage of Dallas’ shoddy perimeter defense, as it has allowed the third-most field goal attempts in the restricted area, even though its double-big approach has resulted in opponents shooting the 11th-lowest percentage once they get downhill. So far this season, the Warriors haven’t done a good job doing that, attempting the seventh-fewest shots at the rim and ranking 29th in points in the paint. The Mavericks have the opposite issue: while they’ve done an above-average job getting to the basket, they don’t finish well once they get there, and Golden State has done a good job preventing attempts in the restricted area, allowing the third-fewest rim tries per game since switching to its current starting lineup.
Dallas will need to be especially sharp in transition, since it hasn’t been as sharp on the boards as might otherwise be expected for a team that occasionally plays the six-foot-10 Davis alongside both Flagg (six-foot-nine) and Daniel Gafford (six-foot-10). That’s an area in which the Mavericks have excelled, scoring the fourth-most points on fast breaks, while the aging Warriors, who lack top-level athleticism and intensity besides the benched Jonathan Kuminga, have been poor at preventing points off of turnovers and merely average at preventing fast break points. Golden State plays a volatile game, averaging the third-most turnovers and the fourth-most steals, while Dallas has been more steady. The Warriors will need to stay disciplined, as Mavericks have been better at both drawing fouls and not fouling.
With Dallas owning the edge both in paint play and transition play, Golden State will also need to shoot the lights out, and that’s one area in which it holds a massive advantage over the Mavericks, who have been the league’s third-worst three-point shooting team this season. Some shooting luck normalization might help Dallas, which allows the second-fewest wide-open three-point attempts per game, but both teams have gotten extremely lucky that opponents have consistently missed their uncontested tries. The Warriors have also generated the third-most wide-open triples and the Mavericks the third-fewest, so the offensive shooting differential can hardly be chalked up solely to luck. Dallas’ spacing might be even more atrocious if Thompson and Christie, the team’s two best shooters, can’t play.
Golden State should come out on top because it has the far better shooters and more experience playing in the holiday showcase, but it’s not unreasonable to expect a feisty, fast, and physical Mavericks team to keep it competitive. The Warriors win with their shooting, and Dallas has done a good job keeping opposing shooters contained. Orlando is similarly good at limiting wide-open shots but almost equally as bad at shooting, and that game went under the total. I expect this one to as well.
