Dallas Mavericks: Away games will be essential next season

Having acquired multiple role players to complement our rising stars, the Dallas Mavericks will need to win games in order to contend for the playoffs. However, they struggled last season in an important area: away games.

Everyone knows that winning is the most basic part of basketball. Whether they come easily or in a tough match up, getting wins helps you move up in the standings and eventually make the playoffs. For the Dallas Mavericks, wins did not come easy last year.

While Dallas did manage to grab 33 wins despite multiple injuries and trades occurring throughout the season, there is something very concerning: 24 of those wins were at home.

That would mean that when the Mavericks played away from the American Airlines Center, they only won nine games of their 41 played.

This should be unsettling for the Mavericks. If they do plan to take a playoff spot this season, winning games, including those played away, will be required.

It might be more than just winning away games. The Mavericks seem to take a dip statistically when they are away from Dallas. At a regular home game, they average about 110 points per game, compared to only 107 away from home. Their opponents, however, average almost 112 points per game as hosts and shoot 46 percent on field goals. Dallas also has a worse plus/minus while playing on the road, as they are -4.9 against a +2.3 at home.

Even with many indications that Dallas did tremendously worse on the road than at home, it should be taken into account that they did were missing some key players towards the end of the year thanks to injuries and trades. This season looks to be different, especially with young and healthy players added on to the team, such as Seth Curry and Delon Wright.

Dallas has had difficulties while they are not playing at the American Airlines Center. They lost many more games than they won, which led to them having only 33 games won last season. They aim to do better this season, with Kristaps Porzingis here to help Luka Doncic lead the Mavericks back to the playoffs for the first time since 2016. Better get prepared.