Mavericks can't debut in-season tournament court due to mishap

NBA fans who have sharpened their knives at the sight of the in-season tournament basketball courts have to put them away for the time being when it comes to the Dallas Mavericks.

The Mavs won't debut the special floor Friday night due to a "manufacturing issue," as an NBA spokesman told ESPN's Tim MacMahon. They will use their traditional court in the first home game of the tournament against the Los Angeles Clippers. Reportedly, there was a defect in the court that would not allow it to meet NBA standards.

This is the second issue that Dallas has contended with prior to the new regular-season competition since it began last Friday. At an early Nov. 3 shootaround in Denver's Ball Arena, Grant Williams said that the measurement of the three-point line was off, prompting a repainting of the line hours before the game. (The defending NBA champion Nuggets won the game that night, 125-114.)

For this inaugural competition, the NBA decided to create new courts to go along with the 2023-24 City Edition uniforms, which were created by Nike. Each court offers a different look to the individual team identities, either with bold primary colors such as the Chicago Bulls' predominantly red scheme or an almost monochromatic look such as what the Memphis Grizzlies will debut.

The courts themselves have gotten overwhelmingly negative reviews, one of the few topics of wide agreement on social media these days. (The new floors may have prompted at least one cranky columnist the opportunity to spew his usual venom about how the NBA does business.)

MacMahon's report recalls a concern about the timing of the courts' arrivals to each arena in August, where a league executive said that the involved parties had to work quickly to implement the uniform design and deliver the new floors before the start of the season:

"We started making decisions later than we probably could have," Christopher Arena, the NBA's head of on-court and brand partnerships, told ESPN's Zach Lowe in October. "And it became, 'OK, how are we going to do this? How are we going to get 30 courts to 30 teams in 29 buildings and do it in time? Are we crazy?'"

The in-season tournament parquets were not the only summertime worry in the league as the NBA was implementing Hawk-Eye technology into each arena. While the Mavs and the NBA had an easy fallback to use the traditional court, it remains to be seen if the new tracking system has any backup should a serious problem with a controversial call comes up.