Following their loss to the Los Angeles Lakers in which they gave up a 27-point lead, head coach Jason Kidd called out his Dallas Mavericks team saying that the team needs to “grow up” after being on the wrong side of the biggest comeback of the season.
Dallas dropped the big lead, and the game, to the Lakers 111-108 at the American Airlines Center, which is astounding given that NBA teams were 138-0 after leading by that much this season prior to the Mavs loss.
“I’m not the savior here. I’m not playing,” Kidd said following the game, according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon.”I’m watching, just like you guys.
“As a team, we’ve got to mature. … We’ve got to grow up — if we want to win a championship. There’s no young team that’s ever won a championship, mentally or physically.”
While Kidd did not specifically call out Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic, he did allude to Doncic who, as he normally does, argued calls and non-calls throughout the course of the game, several times while the ball was actually in play.
“Just focus on that play,” Kidd said. “Can’t get distracted with the whistle, and just keep playing. It just happens that way. We’ve seen a lot of basketball games. When you have big leads, you know which way the whistle is going to go.”
“We lost our rhythm in the sense of just playing the game and not worrying about the other elements,” Kidd said. “We were playing at a high level on both ends, offensively and defensively, and then we just got a little distracted with the whistle. We’ve just got to be better with that.”
Doncic finished with 26 points, 9 rebounds and 5 assists for Dallas.
Doncic addressed the possibility that his disagreements with officials become a distraction saying – “It’s probably true.”
“You can say that, but we still had a big lead,” Doncic said. “Sometimes you’re going to lose it, but I think we just relaxed a little bit and we’ve got to work on that.”
