Mavericks Come Home for NBA Cup Friday: 1-0 in West Group A, Two Straight Losses, and a Jazz Team on a Six-Game Slide

The NBA Cup brought Dallas its last win, and the Mavericks would like it to bring the next one. Dallas hosts the Utah Jazz on Friday night at the American Airlines Center — tip at 7 p.m. CT on MAVSTV+ and KFAA Channel 29, with radio on 105.3 FM KRLD and 99.1 FM KFZO — in the Mavericks' second game of West Group A play. Dallas opened the tournament last Friday with a 116-111 win over Houston, good for a 1-0 group record and a +5 point differential that trails only Denver's +7, and that win closed a three-game winning streak. The week since has gone the other way: a 115-100 home loss to Sacramento on Monday without Kyrie Irving, and Wednesday's 112-111 loss at San Antonio, the reigning Western Conference champion.

Wednesday is the game Dallas has to metabolize. Cooper Flagg (19 points, 10 rebounds) and P.J. Washington (21 points, 10 rebounds) both recorded double-doubles, and Irving — back after missing the Kings game — scored 29, his second straight outing as his highest-scoring stretch of the season after the 35 he put on Houston in the Cup opener. It still was not enough against Victor Wembanyama's 52 points and 24 rebounds. The bench offered one real encouragement: Naji Marshall, reintegrated after the illness that kept him out of the Cup opener — an illness significant enough that coach Dusty May told reporters he was concerned Marshall had dropped weight — scored 22 points on 9-of-12 shooting in San Antonio. Marshall averages 13.6 points a game, one of four Mavericks in double figures, behind Flagg's team-leading 24.3.

Utah arrives in worse shape and says so plainly. The Jazz are 1-7, on a six-game losing skid, playing the third date of a four-game road trip and their first Cup game of the season. They lost 120-113 in overtime at New Orleans on Wednesday despite 39 points from Keyonte George and a 21-point, 10-rebound double-double from Lauri Markkanen — Ace Bailey's 15 were the only other Jazz points in double figures. 'I believe the shooting is going to turn, so we have to stay on process offensively,' Utah coach Will Hardy said, in the Reuters file. Markkanen's night was his second straight game of at least 20 points, played through a wrist injury suffered October 26 against Memphis that has left him, in Hardy's telling, in a lot of pain while filling a new position at center. Utah's scoring after George (22 a game) and Markkanen (17.1) thins quickly with Jaren Jackson Jr. (16.3) out a reported six to eight weeks with a knee injury; the next man is rookie Darryn Peterson at 12.6. On paper, at home, this is the get-right game on Dallas's schedule. The Cup's point-differential math is exactly why the Mavericks cannot treat it like one.