The Dallas Mavericks' second game in the NBA's Orlando bubble had plenty of promising moments.
But that didn't prevent the team from dropping to 0-2 since the NBA restart. The Phoenix Suns rallied from a 13-point halftime deficit to grab a 117-115 victory on Sunday.
“You know when you play as poorly as we did in the third (quarter), you know you just leave too many things to chance," Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle said. "It’s unfortunate because we played the other three quarters quite good."
But the Mavericks were actually winners before the game ever began. A loss by Memphis earlier in the day gave them their first playoff berth since 2016.
“Obviously our goal was to make the playoffs and we achieved that," Mavericks forward Kristaps Porzingis said. "But at least for me, we’re going to try to win every game that we have left now in the regular season and then we’ll see where we end up in the playoffs and go from there.”
"The objective (was) to get into the playoffs this year," guard Luka Doncic said. "But it doesn’t matter who plays, if you want to win you got to beat everybody and we just got to learn from these mistakes. It’s a little bit of details we do. We got to start (the) third quarter stronger, be physical and we got to learn from that.”
