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Spencer Dinwiddie wanted to jump onto the scorer’s table, but he forgot where it was. His game-winning, buzzer-beating 3-pointer had just handed the Dallas Mavericks yet another win, a 113-111 victory against the Brooklyn Nets, the team’s 10th win in the past 12 games. After hitting a game-winning 3 against Boston just three days earlier, Dinwiddie had joked with teammate Theo Pinson that he’d stand on the scorer’s table if he repeated his game-winning heroics against his former team.

But when he started running, he realized he was headed toward the television broadcast table, not the sturdier, permanent structure on the opposite side.

“I was like, ‘Dang, I probably can’t stand on this table,'” Dinwiddie said afterward.

Dinwiddie then saw Dallas general manager Nico Harrison standing with vice president of basketball operations Michael Finley. “That’s when I went over and celebrated with him,” Dinwiddie said. “(I said) ‘thank you’ and ‘let’s go home’ with a lot of expletives and handshakes and chest bumps.”

Dallas, after all, brought him from a team outside of the Play-In Tournament to a team that has moved into a tie with the Utah Jazz for the Western Conference’s fourth seed. To a team that has won 10 of its past 12 games since he started playing.

To a team where he’s hit consecutive game-winning 3s, one where he’s averaging 18 points on 63 percent true shooting.

It wasn’t obvious this was how Dinwiddie’s Mavericks career would start. It’s still genuinely surprising he’s hit every single 3 — don’t check the math — he’s taken thus far in a Dallas jersey. But he’s here and hitting them. He’s helped a very good team consistently beat title-contending ones, even making us wonder whether we should be wary about limiting them to the “very good” label.

“Nico didn’t have to have that faith. He didn’t have to pull that trigger, especially with a player the caliber of (Kristaps) Porziņģis, an All-Star-caliber player,” Dinwiddie said. “I was appreciative of him. That’s why I went and celebrated with Nico.”

After a half-season where Dinwiddie felt he was unfairly maligned for another franchise’s many problems, it was released stress for him to celebrate with the person who brought him to a healthier place.

Dinwiddie differs from Luka Dončić and Jalen Brunson, the team’s two playmakers, in his quickness of attack and decision-making. Dončić is Dončić, and Brunson is similar: Both attack the rim but take time doing so, beating defenders with a combination of guile, deceptiveness and skill. Dinwiddie, however, uses his quickness and frame to attack downhill at all times. He takes his catch-and-shoot 3s without hesitation when Dončić and Brunson still pass up open ones.

Good teams need mixes of both approaches. I’ve remained a huge Brunson fan throughout this process, but if you feel differently about the new second options, it’s because Dinwiddie attacks differently — drawing fouls twice as often as Brunson, for example — than his counterparts. It’s a fresher perspective that Dallas didn’t have in its rotation before. And it’s one that has proven beneficial to all parties involved, even providing vindication for the man who traded for him, Harrison, who got to celebrate a game-winning shot with the player who marked his first major move as a Dallas executive.

Jason Kidd and his coaching staff’s approach this season has centered around freedom and trust. I’ve described it before as a “not Rick Carlisle” approach, and it’s increasingly clear that he has been exactly what this team has needed. A rigid management system can identify and eliminate bad mannerisms, after all, but it’s clearly worked better this season to help players understand their limitations than to have them fearfully avoid them.

Dallas double-teamed Kevin Durant for just about the entirety of Wednesday’s win. “We were trying something, something that we hadn’t done,” Kidd said afterward. “We wanted to try something without practicing it, and I thought the guys did a great job. Now that we have it on tape, we can go back and look and understand what we are trying to do. And we’ll do it better the next game when we have to face someone like that.”

Kidd has said before that he views the regular season as an 82-game preparation for the postseason, that he’s willing to experiment with the team’s long-term aspirations in mind. It’s a holistic approach in stark contrast to Carlisle’s symptom-based coaching.

Whether these hard doubles against Durant worked is a matter of perspective. The Mavericks conceded about 124 points per 100 possessions, far more than their increasingly stingy defense gives up against most teams, and Durant became increasingly adept at picking them apart, especially in the third quarter. It was a Durant-less, Dončić-less stretch early in the fourth when Dallas closed the gap that had widened in the minutes before. It wouldn’t have been a replicable strategy if Kyrie Irving or Ben Simmons had been on the floor. But it certainly frustrated Durant.

“That shows me that the level of respect is high for them, to forget about their schemes as a team, forget about what they’ve been working on most of the year, for them to do that,” Durant said afterward. “I asked Jason Kidd, I said, ‘Well shit, you pay Dorian Finney-Smith all that money. Is he a defender, or you relying on this for (the) next four years with him?’ It’s smart strategy. Gotta tip your hat to them. They executed.”

It’s remarkable that Dallas didn’t just trap or blitz Durant on pick-and-rolls but sent another player at him every chance he had the ball. It’s the most aggressive doubling you’ll see in the NBA, and it often forced the team into defending three-on-four. Durant admitted afterward that he rushed and missed layups late in the game due to this unnatural way he had been defended; he finished with 23 points on 8-of-20 shooting. The strategy didn’t suddenly succeed because Dinwiddie’s final 3 went in instead of rimming out. But Kidd said he wanted to see what would happen, and it was clear he would live with the results.

“That’s always been my thought process,” Kidd said. “A lot of times, it’ll take one game, but it’s the journey of growing and being able to throw different pitches and see who can handle what, what works and what doesn’t work, so that we have those answers going into a playoff series.”

It’s incredible that Dončić casually scoring 37 points, with nine rebounds and nine assists, isn’t even the secondary story following another Dallas win. Then again, what more is there to say about him when he does this on a nightly basis? I sometimes wonder if he hunts big-man switches more for the irrational confidence he has taking stepback 3s against them than for their actual defending ability. Getting switched onto Andre Drummond, sure, that’s an obvious advantage. But Nic Claxton isn’t some stiff center unable to move his feet, and Dončić still viewed him as prey.

Dončić said the only defender he didn’t like scoring against was his fellow Slovenian Goran Dragić. “No, it’s less fun,” he said. “I can’t talk trash to him. He’s my mentor.” But he still scored against him. Slovenia may be the country of love, but basketball isn’t.