Regression to the mean: Tim Duncan loses a bet to Nowitzki

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AT&T CENTER — On the night, San Antonio Spurs power forward Tim Duncan lost more than his team’s 12-game winning streak to his Mavericks counterpart, Dirk Nowitzki. He also lost a bet.

If last night’s loss to the Dallas Mavericks had any ring of familiarity, that’s because in an eerie way, it was. Beyond another meeting of two classic rivals, or the return of familiar face Ian Mahinmi, this game presented a discomforting case of déja vu. You see, last season when these two teams met the San Antonio Spurs lost a similar game in their first round playoff series.

Then, following a blistering Game 1 performance from Nowitzki, Tim Duncan muttered a phrase that ultimately got the Spurs through the first round. It also proved to be dead wrong.

“And I can go ahead and bet he’s not going to go 12 of 14 again.”

At the time those seemed like wise words, making a case not to overreact to a hot night from a great offensive player. And while the message still rings true in theory, technically those words are very, very wrong. Dirk did it again.

Nowitzki peppered the Spurs with 26 points on 14 shots, hitting 12 of them. It was an amazing night from a great shooter, but still one you dare him to have. Because while Nowitzki has shown that such a night is certainly reproducible, it’s still not very common, and ultimately not the reason the Spurs lost.

Part of the pounding the rock mentality Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich has instilled in this franchise is to only concern yourself with what you can control, eventually everything else will regress or progress to the mean. An outlier night from an offensive player like Nowitzki is not one of those things.

What can be controlled are the 17 turnovers that occurred in both games. Last night the Mavericks various zones and schemes, now implemented with a healthy Tyson Chandler, seemed to confuse and halt some of the dribble penetration from the Spurs backcourt, Tony Parker in particular. Some of it can be chalked up to a sloppy night, some of it to this being the first time the Spurs have seen these Mavs play that defense.

Shawn Marion can also generally be controlled, provided the Spurs can stay out of three guard lineups against him come Spring. Marion has always been terribly mediocre against the Spurs as a small forward, perhaps as a small forward in general. What makes him a special player has always been his ability to rebound and defend the power forward position well enough to take advantage of his athleticism at the other end.

But put a significantly smaller player on him, like a Gary Neal, and it opens up his offense to post opportunities and allows him to settle into that bigger forward role. The Spurs can survive Nowitzki, but combined with a 19-point, 8-12 showing from Marion last night? The results are in the box score.

These two teams know each other so well the season series promises to be an entertaining game of chess. Tim Duncan will attack from the same spots, Matt Bonner will always be chased off that three-point line by Maverick defenders. Caron Butler, until he is traded, will always find a way to somehow get four turnovers despite the fact that the only move in his arsenal is to jab step in the same spot before unleashing a midrange jumper.

And, of course, I can bet you Dirk Nowitzki won’t go 12 of 14 again.

  • NYC

    That is a great point: they threw us off with their new (and improved) defense. We don’t have Ericka Dampier to kick around anymore. With a healthy Chandler and Haywood (though not for last night), the Mavs actually have a center to throw at us, and, as the article pointed out, it showed last night in our offense’s inability to deal with their defense. Plus, Chandler was effective offensively as well. I can’t wait to see how we will respond. This chess match just got more interesting, and the ante just went up between these two, old rivals.

  • TD=Best Ever

    My thoughts excatly – 3 gaurd line ups and having RJ try to guard Dirk with 5-6 min left in the game is just bad coaching – RJ doesn’t play GREAT Defense at his postion – SO why would he play Dirk well……….. And Blair is beginning to look like an EPIC Fail in the starting line up………… SO last year the SPURS needed a 4th scoring option and a 3rd BIG to advance in the playoffs – WE finally have found a 4th scoring option, but really need to limit the playing time of Blair and Bonner – if they are scoring and rebounding – GREAT………… if not – they are so bad on D, that they kill us……………

  • ThatBigGuy

    The Mavs improved and changed some things up. Now we know, we’ll have a game plan for it next game. In college, we’d play 2 games against conference teams. If we lost the first one, our coach would tell us, “Now we know what they can do, they know what we can do, and the better team will win the second game.”

    The same thing applies here. Let’s not forget that we only lost by 9 even though Parker and Jefferson scored 27 less points combined than their averages. Add that to the hot shooting night for Dirk and Chandler making 13-16 FT’s, and you have a loss.

    Next game Parker and Jeff will score more, Dirk and Chandler won’t shoot as well, and we’ll win. Regression to the mean, indeed.

  • NYC

    Some things I thought about (not necessarily good or bad):

    1) Wasn’t Blair very effective against Dallas last season? What’s changed? Is it the soph. slump he’s been in, in general, or have other teams figured out how to neutralize Blair? Or is it because they have an athletic Chandler out there this season instead of a slow and feckless Dampier? (Can you tell that I really don’t like Dampier?)

    2) George Hill continues to be our most effective player against Dallas. We should play to that strength more. I’m not sure how (or why), but we should do that somehow. Someone should write some analysis as to why he is so effective against the Mavs, and how we can exploit that even more.

    3) For the love of all that’s holy, please stop putting Bonner on Dirk. I’ve argued before that Bonner is no worse than mediocre and a hard worker, but he simply doesn’t have what it takes to slow down Dirk. Not even a little bit. Putting Bonner in front of him is like waving a red cape in front of a bull. And Bonner’s too slow to get out the way.

    I don’t know that there’s anything we can do to slow down Dirk, but I know that putting Bonner on him is just asking for trouble. Please cut it out. Blair can’t match up with him either because Dirk will just shoot right over Blair. I guess McDyess has to be on the court every second Dirk is.

    4) Last night Jefferson looked like the Jefferson of last season. He looked lost and confused and ignored. That’s even weirder when you consider that he had one of his few breakout games last season against Dallas.

    In the last few games, we’ve gone away from Jefferson in favor of our red hot guards. Even Neal seems to be getting the ball more than Jefferson. We need to stop this trend. Immediately. Jefferson has proven he can be effective on this team–particularly against Dallas! But if we keep alienating him, he’s going to check out and revert to last season’s form. Part of the reason we’ve been so successful this season is because we were getting production out of him. We need to keep him involved in the offense and call more plays for him.

    If Manu has a bad night, we know he’ll just pick right back up the next game. (Or if he has a bad three-quarters, we still believe in him to give him the ball in the fourth to hit the game winner.) If Jefferson has a bad night, or a string of bad nights, we go away from him and he doesn’t see the ball anymore. That’s not going to help him get his game back, now is it?!

    We need to continue to pass him the ball and let him fight his way out of a slump. I think by alienating him on offense, we are bruising his confidence and denying him the opportunity to get re-involved in the game. Bottom line: draw more plays for RJ. He may continue to bomb for a while, but if stick with him through the struggles, it’ll show him that we have confidence in him and that we expect big things out of him.

    You know how when a very young child falls down, the first thing it does is look at his parents for their reaction? If the parents come running over to kiss its boo-boo and make a big fuss, the child learns to cry for his parents every time it falls down. On the other hand, if the parents act very nonchalantly and simply expect the child to get up without making a fuss, the child learns to just get up and that falling down is no big deal. That’s what we gotta do with Jefferson. We can’t react and re-adjust our game every time he has a bad night. We need to continue to feed him the ball and expect him to work through it.

  • NYC

    @ BigGuy

    “…and the better team will win the second game.”

    +10

  • Sergio

    I was at the game last night, and the article is spot on. The new Mavs’ new defensive schemes really took Parker out of the game. It also caused a lot of our penetrations to end in a TO due to an unecessary pass. There were a couple of instances late in the game where someone would penetrate and instead of going strong to the hoop they would doube pump a pass to an unsuspecting Duncan who would fumble it out of boounds. Sloppy play overall, particularly to start of the 3rd period. Nothing to get too worried about, this is just par for the course for the series.

    I did get yelled at by Rick Carlisle, for whatever that is worth.

  • Mano

    I didn’t get to see the game, but from looking at the box score it was mostly on Parker and Hill. 1 assist? ONE FREAKING ASSIST? And it’s not like he was going off for serious points. Now, not having seen the game, maybe it was just that every potential assist he had was ruined by a poor shooting night, but that seems hard to believe. How can both of our point guards be out-assisted by Timmy?

    On the plus side, this kind of performence does seem pretty aberrant, and they did (or Manu did) manage to keep the game competitive despite a really terrible for parker, so I’m not going to panic yet.

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  • DorieStreet

    In his decade or so as a starter, the Spurs have never had an answer for Nowitski. It was just that during the playoffs we just force him to have 1 bad game, 2 good ones, & while he goes off in the other 2 or 3 (4) games, you shut down most of the other Mavericks. The recent problem the Spurs have is handling the newcomer guards Barea & Beaubois. Our defensive scheme the last 2 seasons get destroyed by quick small guards. We ignore them until they put up 9-12 points (usually 3′s) and they force the team into TOs. I feel we need a defensive minded 4/PF who could contest with Dirk and his type, plus grab rebounds. The disparit on the boards recently is disturbing.

  • ribanez1

    I thought the Spurs, except for Ginobili, could not match the energy of the Mavericks towards the end. Nowitski and Terry as usual were tough at crunch time! Tim and Tony played like they were sleep walking. Bonner can not and will not produce points consistently after he is chased from behind the 3 pt. line. And he certainly can not defend! If the Mavericks were a test the Spurs flunked badly!

  • zainn

    I think the reason blair and bonner was on witzki was because pop wanted them to obtain some experience on him. I’m pretty sure if pop really wanted to win this game, like it was the playoffs, he wouldve played duncan more minutes, and mcdyess mostly and bonner for about 6 min wouldve been on dirk the whole game, and we probably wouldve won, looking back to this season’s playoffs. I’m pretty sure late in the season, if we’re locked into a certain spotin the standings, (which is highly unlikely) pop will probably rest manu and duncan for like 5 games, and play our bench a lot. I would like to see that, I think that pop is just going to play hard early, and then after a high number of wins, put the high minutes on tony and manu on hold a little bit when james anderson returns, (which i REALLY miss because of his great combination of defense and offense that he was coming around to) But,we had to lose sometime, GO SPURS GO!

  • Jim Henderson

    NYC
    November 27th, 2010 at 11:00 am

    Agree with your take on RJ.

  • Bob

    The best bets for containing Nowitzki are either McDyess or Splitter. Golden State a couple of years ago left the blueprint for stopping Nowitzki. I don’t know more teams don’t use it. Splitter really should be getting more minutes because we’re going to need him to combat the Laker’s length in the playoffs.

  • Todd

    I liked this article and agree (in principle) with the ideas. I also have always loved the Mavs-Spurs rivalry, which I think is one of the best in the NBA. I will only point out that there is a guy with the initials RB on the Mavericks who has yet to set foot on the court this season, but is slowly coming back into form. Indeed, there will be some additional jockeying for position and adjustments to be made as the season progresses, but not all of them will come from the Spurs.

  • Anoop

    Reviewing the match, 4 possessions was the difference between the two teams. Unfortunately, this will be the case for most of the close games going forward.

    Do the Spurs have any flexibility to get some size advantage at the small forward position? Could they get Jamie Gist back? What about Tayshuan Prince, murmurs of disagreement with the coach? What could Spurs offer to any team for getting a “playable” small forward back up for RJ, surely Ime is not expected to last the season. Any thoughts?

  • http://www.48minutesofhell.com Len

    Tayshaun still has gas in the tank, imo. I’d like to have him but I’m not sure what RC could give up for him. We can’t afford to lose a big, except for Bonner and he wouldn’t be enough to get Prince.

    The other problem would be how to divide up the minutes between RJ and Prince. Would Prince be willing to take on a reduced role and would Mr. Holt be willing to take on his extra salary.

    I think JA has the job and Ime just has to last until he’s back in game shape.

  • Jim Henderson

    Len
    November 28th, 2010 at 6:55 am

    Exactly.