Jason Kidd must really not like coaching in Game 1s.
Kidd’s Dallas Mavericks suffered an embarrassing loss in Sunday’s first-round series opener against the LA Clippers. They came out lifeless in the first two quarters, entering halftime down 56-30. While Dallas closed the gap a bit in the second half, they still never got the game back into single digits and wound up losing 109-97.
After the loss, a wild statistic about Kidd’s tenure as Mavs head coach went viral. The defeat dropped the team to 0-4 in Game 1s during the Kidd era.
Jason Kidd is now 0-4 in Game 1s as the Mavs coach.
— Panda Hank (@pandahank41) April 21, 2024
The other three losses all came during the 2022 postseason, so the good news is that the Mavs actually came back to win the series two of those times. But they will have to do better than simply relying on history to overcome the Clippers this year.
Dallas’ lack of a pulse offensively outside of the star duo of Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving played a major role in Sunday’s loss, especially their abhorrent second quarter where the Mavs made just two total field goals and scored eight points overall. But Kidd did not do himself any favors either by failing to manage his timeouts properly when the Clippers were pulling away and by relying on big minutes from reserves like Maxi Kleber and Tim Hardaway Jr. (neither of whom appear to be particularly playable in this series).
Sunday will ultimately go down as a major missed opportunity for the Mavs since the Clippers were without Kawhi Leonard, who seems likely to return at some point this series. Kidd will have to make the right adjustments from here and avoid falling back to his old bad habits that Mavs fans are used to.
