Things couldn’t have gone much better for Coach Jason Kidd and the Dallas Mavericks in their home opener on Tuesday night at American Airlines Center.
All 15 rostered players saw action for Dallas, the result of a meeting between Coach Kidd and the Mavs’ players’ leadership council before the game, and the Mavericks defeated the Houston Rockets 116-106 to improve to 2-1 on the young season. Afterward, J-Kidd told the media of the plans to get everyone some run in the home opener, and how much it meant to his players.
“Kind of cool, on opening night, that 15 guys played. If we could have played the two-way guys, we would’ve. [The players] came to me this morning, through the council that we have, and those players that I talked to thought this was a great idea, so I was with it,” Jason said. “The matrix was in a twist, but we figured it out and it’s a really cool thing. They knew that they were playing. I give them credit for not telling [the media]. It’s a really cool thing in this league, opening night. The floor here has all the names of the current and past players on it, so for those players to be able to touch the floor with their names out there was really cool.”
Houston actually led the game for most of the first half, but a three-point play by Luka Doncic with five minutes left in the first half put the Dallas in front. The Rockets took the lead back right before halftime, but the Mavs opened the third quarter on a 13-0 run and never looked back, leading by as much as 12 en route to the 10-point win.
Dallas’ scoring efforts were once again led by Doncic, who tallied 26 points and pulled down 14 rebounds. All told, 11 of the 15 guys that touched the floor also got on the scoreboard. Offseason acquisition Reggie Bullock chipped in 16 points on 6-of-11 from the field, and Jalen Brunson had a double-double with 11 points and 11 assists. Boban Marjanovic added 11 points on a perfect 5-of-5 from the field.
“We’re going to go back and look at this. There’s a lot of good things. Bobie was great. He changed the game for us. Moses [Brown] changed the game for us. Reggie changed the game for us,” Coach Kidd said. “We’ll go back and look at it, look at the different combinations. I won’t probably be able to do this a lot more, to play all 15, but to just look at the different combinations, it’s a beautiful thing. The chemistry and accountability that we’ve talked about from day one holds true tonight, because those guys that played, everyone on the bench was cheering for those guys on the floor. And they played to win. That was the big thing we talked about this morning is that everyone’s playing but we’re playing to win, and they did that tonight.”
Watch Coach Kidd’s full post-game press conference below.