POPS Mensah-Bonsu received his first taste of NBA basketball this week although his involvement with the Dallas Mavericks looks destined to be short-lived. The Tottenham-born forward is scheduled to move to Western champions’ Development team Fort Worth Flyers early next week.
The 6’9” forward had made the 12-man Mavs squad for five games this season without stepping onto the court but, with Dallas currently in a rich vein of form, he appeared for the final three minutes of Tuesday’s comfortable 107-80 victory over the Washington Wizards, a seventh straight win for his team.
Mensah-Bonsu, a product of the late Joe White’s basketball programme in Hackney, had just one defensive rebound to show for his efforts but the fact he has made it onto the floor at all is a major achievement for a player who went undrafted out of George Washington in the summer.
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The Mavs ensured Mensah-Bonsu felt at home as he made his debut in front of a capacity 20,800 crowd with the team’s legendary public address announcer Billy Hayes calling in a mock British accent: “Welcome to the NBA, lad!”
However, his involvement will be curtailed by the imminent return of Josh Howard and Devean George, who are recovering from ankle and knee injuries respectively, some time over the weekend.
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Their returns coincide with the start of the NBAD (NBA Development) league and the British forward seems destined to be assigned to the Flyers early next week in order to gain much-needed playing time in the professional ranks. NBA teams are allowed to send first and second year players to their development - effectively “farm” or reserve - teams and the Mavs have indicated for some time that such would be Mensah-Bonsu’s fate.
Following a poor start, Dallas have started to rediscover the form that carried them to last season’s NBA Finals and one of their seven straight victories came against the Chicago Bulls and their British duo of Luol Deng and Ben Gordon. Deng’s 24-point, 10-rebound performance was one of the few highlights of that 111-99 defeat for a Bulls team that is currently in free-fall. Ttheir 3-8 record features five consecutive defeats, all of them on the road.
Deng, at least, is living up to his pre-season billing as a potential break-out player this year as he leads the team in scoring (17.3 points per game) and is joint second in rebounds (5.5 rpg). Gordon has struggled to find his consistency although his demotion from a starting position to the bench has seen his output improve and he currently averages 16.4 points a game, third on the Bulls.
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Chicago’s slow start to the campaign is one of many surprises in the new season, the greatest of all probably coming from Salt Lake City where the Utah Jazz have the best record in the league, having made the best start to a season in franchise history with an 11-1 mark.
The latest win came in the early hours of Thursday as the Jazz rallied from a 21-point third quarter deficit to win their seventh straight game, 110-101 at the Sacramento Kings. This was par for the course for a Utah team with a penchant for the dramatic - their previous two victories required overcoming 16-point deficits in the third quarter, one of them an overtime victory over Phoenix.
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“We have some real fighters on this team, we keep getting down early but we come back in the second half,” said Matt Harpring, who had 16 points against the Kings. “It was another great win, but we don’t want to rely on winning this way.”