I would put it right up there with an NFL-powered October as the peak of the sports calendar. We have the opening of baseball season, which is always great but even more so this year with the Texas Rangers defending a World Series title. We just enjoyed the men's and women's Final Four to wrap up the college basketball season. We have Masters weekend upon us, which, if you even mildly enjoy golf, is always a beautiful tournament-watching experience and an absolute must-watch on Masters Sunday.
We’ll soon have the NFL Draft, which I always enjoy as it merges my love of college football and the NFL. I will read mock drafts into perpetuity and digest analysis of guys projected to go in the 7th round with a stupid amount of excitement. I just happen to work for a radio station, Sports Radio 1310 AM and 96.7 FM The Ticket, that provides wall-to-wall draft coverage and analysis, and I absolutely love it.
There is also the end of the NHL and NBA regular seasons, which roll right into the playoffs. In my opinion, the best playoff sport of all is NHL hockey. You may not agree, but if you don't, you obviously have not watched playoff hockey.
Regardless of that H.S.O. (hot sports opinion, it’s a Ticket thing), locally, we will soon experience what might be the greatest April in over 20 years. The Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars are both going to the playoffs and each has very real chances to advance. If that happens, it would be the first time in over 20 seasons that both teams won a playoff series in the same season. Hard to believe, but it's true.
One must go back to 2003, when the Mavs reached the Western Conference Finals and the Stars won their first-round series before losing in the second round.
I grew up in North Texas and went to elementary school in Plano in the '80s. If you’re my age, you likely remember the Mavs being pretty good back then. I was in diapers when they arrived in the fall of 1980, which was probably a good thing because they were rather poor during their first three years of existence. They made the playoffs for the first time in ’83–’84 and that began a run of five straight playoff appearances through the decade. They couldn’t get past the Lakers, but I remember loving Derek Harper and Rolando Blackman as a kid.
"We have reached April and that is a wonderful thing."
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In 1988 I was 9 years old when they made that glorious run to the Western Conference Finals with Mark Aguirre, James Donaldson, Detlef Schrempf and Roy Tarpley. That was around the time I really got into basketball. It was also right around the time the Mavs decided to stop winning. From 1991 through 2000, the team didn’t make the playoffs a single time. They spent 10 straight years as one of the worst teams in the league, if not the worst. One of those Mavs teams of the '90s won only 11 games for the entire season. The next season, they won 13. As a reminder, there are 82 games in an NBA season.
They were objectively horrible.
The '90s, as dreary as they were for the local basketball team, however, coincided with the arrival of the Dallas Stars, who made their debut here in the fall of 1993. The Stars and the Mavs shared old Reunion Arena (RIP) downtown, and in that first shared season, the basketball team welcomed the new honkey team to town by allowing them to have all the attention. The ’93-’94 season was the one the Mavs went 13-69. In the Stars' first season in town, they went 42-29-13 and swept the St. Louis Blues in the first round of the playoffs before losing to the Vancouver Canucks in the second round.
Maybe it was a good thing for the Stars that the Mavs were so bad for the first few years they were in Dallas. As we experienced the worst stretch in Mavericks franchise history, the Stars made the playoffs in seven of their first eight seasons in town. That run included three straight appearances in the Western Conference Finals and back-to back Stanley Cup Final runs in ’99 and ’00. They won it all in 1999.
That made those Aprils, Mays, and a couple of Junes very easy to navigate with the focus on only one of those two Reunion Arena teams. When the Mavs made the draft day trade for Dirk Nowitzki in 1998, no one knew that he would be the catalyst for a stretch of 12 straight 50-win seasons that resulted in playoff appearances beginning in 2001.
Meanwhile, the Stars continued to make a run to the playoffs with six more playoff appearances from 2001 to 2008. Yet, somehow, it was rare for either team to advance past the first round. We saw it in the spring of 2001 when, in its final season as home base for both teams, Reunion Arena for the first time had to make plans for both basketball and hockey extending well into April. The Mavs beat the Jazz in the first round before losing to the Spurs in five games in the second round, and the Stars beat the Oilers in six games before getting swept by the Blues in the second round.
The two teams wouldn't pull off a double playoff season again until 2003. Then, the Mavs lost in six games to the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals, and the Stars lost in six games to the Anaheim Ducks in the second round. That year marks both the deepest both teams have made it into the calendar year together as well as the last time both teams advanced past the first round of their playoffs in the same season.
That startling fact seems crazy with the success some of those Mavericks teams had in the Dirk and Steve Nash-glory days of the '00s. But, after 2003 the Stars would advance past the first round just one time in the next 12 seasons. They made an improbable run to the Western Conference Finals in 2008, but that was the year the Mavs lost in the first round in only five games to the New Orleans Hornets.
By the time the Stars finally got past the first round again in 2016, the Mavs were aging and going through a stretch of 10 straight seasons of either missing the playoffs or losing in the first round.
So, here we are in 2024. Since the Stars arrival in ’93–’94, this will be only the eleventh time in 31 seasons that both teams have made the playoffs in the same season. It’s been 21 years since we've enjoyed an extended sports spring in downtown Dallas.
We have already seen a total solar eclipse in Dallas. Maybe with our American Airlines Center tenants, we are about to witness something almost as rare: both teams making playoff runs well into May.
Matt McClearin co-hosts The Invasion on 1310 The Ticket from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays. Visit him on X (@McMattRadio).
