The Dallas Mavericks will make the playoffs. That bold claim, three months prior to the start of the 2019-20 season, comes from the data and metric wonks over at FiveThirtyEight. According to their projections, the Mavs will be the seventh seed in the Western Conference with a 44-38 record.
FiveThirtyEight based its prediction for the Mavericks, and the rest of the NBA, on 50,000 simulations of the coming season. They also use an in-house forecast system cleverly called CARMELO to predict the career arc of players “based on the trajectory of similar NBA players.