The Dallas Mavericks enter the 2024-25 season following a run to the NBA Finals that included them beating two of the top three seeds in the Western Conference.
Dallas started the playoffs with a tough series win over the LA Clippers and followed that up with a six-game series win over the Oklahoma City Thunder and a five-game destruction of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
The Mavs put the rest of the NBA world on notice that they are one of the league’s best contenders throughout this playoff run, and they are poised to play one of the aforementioned Western Conference powerhouses on Christmas Day if some recent rumors are true.
According to NBA insider Marc Stein, “word is one of the proposed Christmas options (subscription required) is Timberwolves at Mavericks.”
Dallas and Minnesota are coming off phenomenal seasons, and this would be a great way for the teams to rematch following an intense Western Conference Finals. Both teams are led by young superstar guards in Anthony Edwards and Luka Doncic, and both squads will likely be battling for the top seed in the Western Conference.
Although Dallas mopped the floor with the Timberwolves in the Western Conference Finals, this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a rivalry forming between these two teams during the playoffs. It’s been clear for years that Doncic and Rudy Gobert don’t seem to like each other, and there were multiple heated moments throughout the series that involved Gobert including Doncic trash-talking him after his Game 2 dagger.
This series also included Dereck Lively II going down with a neck sprain after getting kneed in the head by Karl-Anthony Towns, and a couple of games later he was hit in the head by Naz Reid causing him to go down to the floor in pain holding his head.
Reid was assessed a flagrant foul on this play, and it occurred in Lively II’s first game back from his neck sprain and the Mavs happened to be up by 20 points when it happened in Game 5.
There was also plenty of stake going into that series considering that Edwards called out Kyrie Irving right before the series started. Irving heard what Edwards said, and he “used it as motivation” in that series and quickly made Edwards regret his bold decision of calling him out.
There are plenty of forgotten storylines between these two teams that would make them the perfect matchup for Christmas Day, and the fact that it would be at the American Airlines Center makes it even better.
The Timberwolves and Mavs will be wrestling at the top of the Western Conference standings for years to come, and what better way to preview a potential Western Conference Finals matchup than on Christmas Day with the entire world watching them?
Edwards and Doncic are both at their best when the lights are the brightest, and this would be a matchup between two of the league’s top MVP candidates.
