A blowout usually shrinks the evening’s cast. Dallas expanded its scoring instead.
The Mavericks beat Brooklyn 130-93 at American Airlines Center on Sunday night, moving to 6-4 after never trailing. Cooper Flagg scored 25 and Kyrie Irving added 21, while the five listed starters combined for 72 points. The reserves supplied the other 58, giving Dallas far more than a pair of headline scorers to carry the final total.
That production arrived in stages. Dallas won the first quarter 33-26, then separated from Brooklyn with another 33 points in the second while holding the Nets to 20. The halftime margin was 66-46.
Dallas added 34 points in the third and 30 in the fourth, turning a seven-point lead into 20, then 29 after three and 37 at the finish. The scoring did not fade when the game moved into extended-margin minutes; it simply came from different names.
Santi Aldama provided the clearest example of that handoff. He had turned the ball over on a palming violation with 2:27 left in the second quarter. At 1:35, he answered with a 5-foot driving floating jump shot assisted by Flagg, making the score 63-40. Thirty-one seconds later on the game clock, Aldama took another Flagg pass and made a 23-foot 3-pointer for 66-42.
Those baskets required different solutions. The first came from a drive and touch shot; the second stretched the possession beyond the arc. Aldama finished with 12 points on 5-of-7 shooting in 15 minutes, and his third-quarter 3-pointer, assisted by Irving with 10 seconds remaining, pushed Dallas ahead 97-71.
It was hardly a pressure shot by then, but it showed that Dallas still had a reliable finisher available after the principal scorers had established control.
Zaccharie Risacher’s contribution was more sustained. He scored 11 points on 5-of-8 shooting in 16 minutes, with three second-quarter baskets helping Dallas turn a manageable lead into a landslide. At 8:58, he made a 1-foot running dunk assisted by Flagg for a 49-32 score.
At 8:14, he added a 3-foot layup assisted by Walter Clayton Jr., making it 51-32. With 5:49 left in the period, Risacher finished another running layup off Flagg’s pass for 56-35.
The sequence was valuable because Dallas did not need Risacher to manufacture a high-volume scoring night. He finished plays at the rim, accepted passes from two different creators and converted five of eight shots. The three baskets also arrived while the Mavericks were still building the game, rather than appearing only after the lead was already out of reach.
