Fully disintegrated Dallas
The Mavericks earned NBA's Most Disappointing Team status two weeks ago on this scorecard after back-to-back losses to Charlotte. Turns out we might have been too polite
The NBA has fielded three franchises in Texas since the Dallas Mavericks' expansion season of 1980-81.
In all that time, 43 seasons in total, this will be the first time that the Lone Star State cannot claim a single playoff team.
It would be a serious stretch, though, to lump the 2022-23 Mavericks in with the Houston Rockets and the San Antonio beyond the mammoth expanse of land in which they are all housed. The Rockets and Spurs combined to register two of the league's three worst records and landed precisely where pretty much everyone expected them to: At the front of the line of the Victor Wembanyama Sweepstakes.
Dallas, after a trip to the Western Conference finals, was most definitely not supposed to post a sub-.500 record and essentially finish 21st in a league that sends 16 teams to the playoffs and four more to a postseason of its own known as the play-in round.
Especially not when Luka Dončić, at age 24, was becoming just the second player in league history alongside a certain Michael Jeffrey Jordan to average at least 32 points, eight rebounds and eight assists per game.
A flurry of instant reactions and reflections follows on an absolute disaster of a season in Dallas.