Lowe - How Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and the Dallas Mavericks are swarming their way to the Western Conference finals - ESPN

The only players who appeared for the Dallas Mavericks in the conference finals two seasons ago playing in this second-round series against the Oklahoma City Thunder are Luka Doncic and Josh Green; Green logged a grand total of 121 postseason minutes in 2022.

In about 20 months, the Mavericks remade almost their entire team around Doncic and have somehow — at great cost to their stash of draft picks — arrived within one game of returning to the conference finals for the second time in three seasons. The most important commonality between those teams: elite defense around Doncic.

Maxi Kleber was a keystone of that 2022 run; he's currently injured, robbing the Mavs of their only viable stretch center and one of their most versatile defenders. It hasn't mattered. The Mavs have strangled the league's No. 3 offense behind a defense that is huge, switchable, ultraconnected, and capable of more schematic complexity than perhaps it appeared when the Mavericks paid a high price to acquire both P.J. Washington Jr. and Daniel Gafford at the trade deadline.

The Thunder facilitated the Mavs' acquisition of Gafford; in exchange for the right to swap first-round picks with Dallas in 2028, Oklahoma City supplied the Washington Wizards — Gafford's former team — with a 2024 first-round pick. (Washington, meanwhile, was one of my favorite theoretical trade targets for Oklahoma City.)

The Mavs have allowed 109.7 points per 100 possessions in the playoffs against the league's No. 3 and No. 4 offenses — a mark that would have ranked second in the regular season. This is the continuation of a late-season trend; the Mavs were a top-10 defense after the trade deadline, and No. 1 in their final 15 games.

There is nothing much fluky under the