Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban shut down speculation that head coach Jason Kidd’s job could be in jeopardy after his team’s underperformance this year.
Per Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News, Cuban told reporters Kidd “is absolutely” the team’s head coach as it braces for an uncertain future, both during the remainder of this season and the next.
With only three games left, Dallas (37-42, 11th in Western Conference) can still qualify for a berth in the play-in tournament. But the team’s odds are fading fast.
Per The Ringer, Dallas has a 29 percent chance of reaching the play-in tournament and only a seven percent chance of making it to the first round of the playoffs.
Whenever the Mavs season does come to an end, they’ll then turn their focus toward trying to re-sign guard Kyrie Irving. The trade that sent Irving to Dallas hasn’t panned out the way the organization hoped it would, but Cuban took the blame for that when speaking with reporters.
He specifically pointed to the team’s poor defense down the stretch, saying that “it’s absolutely my fault” for not foreseeing the issues on that side of the ball.
Per stats from NBA.com, the Mavs have the sixth-best offensive rating (116.0) in the league this year, but their defensive rating (115.9) is 23rd.
While Cuban deserves some of the blame for the poor roster construction, he might be letting his head coach off easy.
Kidd made the Hall of Fame as a point guard, but the transition to head coach has been uneven. He coached the Nets for one season and was fired midway through his fourth season with the Bucks. The year after he was fired, Milwaukee finished first in the Eastern Conference with a 60-22 record.
Last season was his most successful as a head coach. The Mavericks went 52-30 and reached the Western Conference finals, but that looks like an outlier in terms of Kidd’s coaching career. In 534 career regular-season games, Kidd is 272-262 and has a losing record (18-24) in the postseason.
