PHOENIX – It’s Dorian Finney-Smith’s 29th birthday, but he said his plans to celebrate were modest.
“Getting a win, that’s it,” he said at shootaround Wednesday morning at Footprint Center.
Finney-Smith is the Mavericks Swiss Army Knife. He has many roles and do a lot of different things on the court.
Lately, he’s been their de facto center in the smallish lineup they have used on occasion. That lineup helped carve a 21-point deficit down to five in the fourth quarter of Game 1 before the Mavericks eventually lost 121-114 to slip into a 1-0 hole in the best-of-seven conference semifinals series.
Finney-Smith said Game 2 is going to be interesting for the players and fans alike because both teams are going to crank out a lot of adjustments, he believes.
And the small lineup may not have gotten the Suns’ full attention since they were just trying to protect their large lead.
“I played a little bit of center in college and high school,” Finney-Smith said. “I don’t really care as long as I’m on the court. I played center a lot the last series. So it’s kind of like an advantage now, I guess.
“But you can’t really say that because it was the end of the game (in the Phoenix opener). Some people would call that a little garbage time. I know they’re going to be better prepared. Everybody’s making adjustments. It’s going to be fun tonight.”
Finney-Smith had 15 points and six rebounds in Game 1. He’s looking forward to improving on those numbers, particularly when it comes to the rebounding department. He said that, while the game was not really in the balance, the Mavericks still learned a lot from their fourth-quarter rally.
“We saw how they were guarding us with the small lineup,” he said. “We didn’t run it the whole time until they got the lead. And they have better big (men) than Utah had because they’re more aggressive. We need to be up on the backboard and postups, but if we slide around and play with energy, I think we’ll give ourselves a chance.”
Then Finney-Smith slipped into some basketball-ese.
“They create a lot of problems, with Devin Booker and Chris Paul,” he said. “And the way we play ball screens, their bigs get a nice run to the rim. So it’s taking the guards to box out anyway. The guys coming off ball screens, they’re setting good screens. So guys are running late. DP (Dwight Powell) and our other big guys got to step up or they’re going to shoot it. So it’s going to be a battle all night.”
The Mavericks know the perils of falling behind 2-0 in a best-of-seven series. Teams that go up 2-0 go on to the next round 92.4 percent of the time (306-25). Four teams went up 2-0 in this year’s first round and all four cruised into the conference semifinals.
So that’s why a win on Finney-Smith’s birthday would be so big.
And, by the way, he did get serenaded with Happy Birthday. The Mavericks’ lone rookie, Moses Wright, had to sing it to Finney-Smith.
“Moses sang it,” he said. “And he sang it with love.”
Twitter: @ESefko
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