With the All-Star weekend quickly approaching, the NBA playoff race is beginning to take form as we make our first real push away from the halfway point of the season.  So who are the contenders and who are the pretenders?  That is ever the question.  Injury remains a significant concern for all teams, but if the playoffs were to start today, I would say that Miami, Boston, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Dallas would be the teams I consider major contenders.

The Heat, Celtics and Spurs are obvious choices and while the Lakers are always an intriguing enigma, their chances and problems have been well chronicled. This leaves the Mavericks to study in this space.

Particularly now that Dirk Nowitzki is back and healthy, Dallas is picking up where they left off before the injury. Caron Butler is gone, but he wasn’t that necessary to begin with and Tyson Chandler is exploding all over the place. 

Following Monday’s win over Cleveland, the Mavericks have won nine in a row to take them to 36-15 (after losing six in a row and seven of eight). They have looked excellent in doing so.

Chandler is posting 10 and 9.5 on the season… in 28 mpg and on 65.3% TS.  He’s in the middle of shooting a career-high 77% from the line, building on the 73% he shot last year. He’s always been an efficient scorer, but the free throw shooting is making a big difference in his offensive contribution. 

He’s actually averaging closer to 14 ppg over the last 17 games or so, and about 11 rpg in that same time period.  Chandler is currently leading the league with a TS of 71.1% and an ORTG of 134.  He doesn’t ISO, so it’s very difficult to zone in on him and between the draw Nowitzki creates as a scoring threat and the playmaking of Jason Kidd, as well as the other shooters on the team, Chandler is free to just crash the glass, run the floor and make a nuisance of himself to great effect. 

Chandler is also killing the offensive glass for Dallas and they’ve needed that for years, plus he’s rebounding quite well on the defensive side of the ball.

The Mavericks have tried to win a title in a million different ways, but they have never had a player with the specific type of impact on a game that Chandler makes. After being eliminated in the first round in the 2010 NBA Playoffs by the Spurs, Chandler is the single biggest element that has changed.