Leaky Black Made Sacramento’s Turning Point Count

At 65-64, Dallas had moved in front in the third quarter. Daniel Gafford had tied the score with a layup, then made the free throw that gave the Mavericks the lead. Sacramento did not need one of its leading scorers to seize every possession that followed.

Leaky Black’s three-pointer put the Kings ahead 67-65, and Sacramento never trailed again in a 115-100 victory Monday at American Airlines Center.

Black changed that stretch because he supplied an answer without demanding the offense be rebuilt around him. He made another three in the third quarter, with Darius Acuff Jr. assisting both of those shots, and Sacramento led 74-67 after Black’s second one. Acuff also supplied the surrounding offense, making a pull-up to reach 69-65 and a driving floater to make it 71-65.

Black’s scoring fit the moment: enough to punish Dallas’ brief advantage, not so much that the Kings had to abandon their larger creators.

Black finished with four threes, four steals and zero turnovers. Consider what a scorekeeper would have missed by putting the emphasis on the 12 points alone. The first of those two third-quarter makes took a lead away. The second, after Sacramento had found more scoring through Acuff, increased the margin to seven. Neither basket required Black to supply the offense on every trip in between.

Acuff and Malik Monk supplied the primary structure. Acuff finished with 25 points and six assists, while Monk had 24 points and seven assists. Acuff’s role was especially visible in the Black sequence: he created both of Black’s third-quarter threes, then scored around them.

Monk’s scoring and playmaking gave Sacramento another organizer. Black’s value was complementary, but complementary does not mean incidental when a team is trying to hold a narrow lead against a capable response.

Dallas had real reasons to believe it could take a lead and hold it. Gafford had scored efficiently from the start and wound up with 20 on 9-for-10 shooting. The Mavericks also earned 29 points at the free-throw line and outscored Sacramento in the paint.

Those were substantial returns. The problem at 65-64 was immediate: all of that work had bought an advantage small enough for a capable supporting shooter to remove in one trip.

What gave Black’s contribution weight was the combination of volume and timing. The Kings could have asked Acuff to take the next shot and the one after that. He had already shown he could score from several distances.

Instead, some of his most productive work was putting the ball in the hands of a teammate whose scoring could change the arithmetic. Two assisted threes in a close quarter are a fine return for trusting a second option.

The broader shooting margin supplied the scale of the victory. Sacramento made 19 threes; Dallas made seven. Monk and Zach LaVine each made five, and Black made four.

Dallas’ free-throw advantage and interior scoring kept the Mavericks within reach, but the Kings’ perimeter production gave them more ways to turn small advantages into separation. Black’s four makes were one part of that total, yet the timing of two was unusually valuable because Dallas had just taken the lead.

The Kings needed that production in a game with several other good scorers. A teammate who can finish an important possession changes where the burden falls. Black was that teammate when Acuff found him, and he had value on defense as well.

Black’s last three was part of a game Sacramento already had in hand. The more revealing one went down while the Kings were behind. A supporting player can spend most of his time making the offense work for somebody else; the best ones are also ready for the possession when the offense works for them.

Black got one of those with Dallas in front, and the Mavericks did not get the lead back.

Sources

ESPN: final game record and play-by-play

NBA: official game report

NBA: final box score