Marcus Sasser made two jumpers in the third quarter. They were his only baskets of the night, and both came off Naji Marshall passes. The second tied the score at 62, an unusually useful return for a guard who finished with four points. In a game the Mavericks eventually lost 115-100, that short run is worth more attention than the margin suggests.
Dallas had trailed by seven earlier in the quarter. P.J. Washington made a three during the rally, and Daniel Gafford would give the Mavericks a lead with a layup and free throw. The rally bought Dallas a lead in a quarter that had started going the other way.
Leaky Black’s next three gave Sacramento the lead for good. Dallas spent part of the quarter building a more useful offense than it had shown immediately after halftime. The Kings changed the score back with a single shot, then started piling up points before the Mavericks could mount another response.
The stretch started with Sacramento scoring that widened a one-point halftime margin to seven. Washington’s three pulled Dallas to within four. Marshall’s passes to Sasser helped finish that part of the climb. Those baskets did not settle the game; they changed what Dallas could reasonably expect from the next few possessions.
Even after Sasser tied it, Dallas needed another exchange to get ahead. Acuff assisted Malik Monk on a dunk. Marshall then found Gafford for the tying layup, and the free throw put Dallas in front.
The lead was a small achievement earned in stages: scoring from outside, two makes from Sasser and a finish near the basket. There was no one answer Sacramento could take away and end that run.
The issue was what Dallas could build on that advantage. Black’s three put the Kings up 67-65. Acuff added two jumpers, and after Dallas scored, Acuff assisted another Black three. At 74-67, Sacramento had regained breathing room. The Mavs could score effectively in bursts, but their best third-quarter stretch ended with the Kings producing an even more valuable one.
The teams entered the fourth with Sacramento ahead 81-74. Dallas’ seven-point deficit looked manageable precisely because it had already erased a gap that size. The difficulty was that the Mavericks were now asking their offense to produce another good sequence without letting the Kings respond. Sacramento had already shown several ways to make that a bad bargain.
Give Dallas credit for another effort to close the gap. Gafford scored 20 on nine made shots in 10 attempts, and Walter Clayton Jr. eventually made a pair of fourth-quarter threes around a Johnson dunk to make it 94-87. It was a different set of players helping another rally, the kind of secondary scoring a team needs.
