With a 22-16 record and a +0.8 point differential, the Dallas Mavericks are in the middle of the pack in the Western Conference, exceeding most outside expectations for the team this season. Instead of crumbling in the aftermath of the DeAndre Jordan saga, they have been able to re-tool on the fly, integrating buy-low veterans like Deron Williams and Zaza Pachulia into a system that has rejuvenated their careers. It almost seems to not matter who they bring in - they can always cobble a playoff-caliber team around Dirk Nowitzki and Rick Carlisle.

At the same time, Dirk is 37, Zaza and Williams are both on the wrong side of 30 and there’s only so much a coach can to boost the ceiling of a team. If the Mavs have any designs on being more than first-round playoff fodder, which they were last season, it will come down to the players on their roster at or near their prime. Everything in Dallas, both this season and going forward, revolves around Chandler Parsons and whether or not the fifth-year forward has any room in his game left to improve and become a featured player on a good NBA team.

When the Mavs gave Parsons a three-year, $45 million contract in the summer of 2014, it raised eyebrows around the league. The rule of thumb is that teams need to overpay to sign restricted free agents and scare their original teams away from matching the offer and that certainly appeared to be the case with the Mavs and Parsons. He had been an important player for the Houston Rockets but he was clearly a secondary option behind James Harden and Dwight Howard and the Rockets actually got better in his absence, bringing in Trevor Ariza at half the price and putting longer and more athletic defenders around Harden on the perimeter.

Nor did Parsons do all that much to justify the big money the Mavs threw at him. He posted numbers right in line with his career averages - 15.7 points, 4.9 rebounds and 2.4 assists a game on 46/38/72 shooting - and served as a cog in a multi-faceted offensive attack that also featured Dirk, Monta Ellis and Rajon Rondo. And while he wasn’t as bad on defense as Dirk and Monta, it’s not like he was a stopper either. When he went down with a knee injury in Game 1 of their first round loss to his former team, it put a disappointing caper on a season that was never live up to expectations in Dallas.

Coming into this summer, the Mavs' plan was clearly to maximize Parsons and get more of a return on the investment they had laid out. Monta and Rondo - ball-dominant guards with big personalities who didn’t have the outside touch to spot up off the ball and be role players - were gone, pushed out the door in order to give Parsons more time on the ball and more of a role in the locker room. Parsons became a de facto assistant GM, helping Cuban lure prospective free agents and whispering in their ears in what looked like a real-life version of Entourage.

The pursuit of DeAndre was all about Parsons. As a 6’9 point forward without elite athleticism, he is most effective coming off a ball screen that clears out his initial defender and allows him to make decisions against a scrambling defense. DeAndre is one of the best roll-men in the league and he could have flourished catching lobs from Parsons in the acres of space created by elite three-point shooters like Dirk, Williams and Wesley Matthews. The Mavs would be a spread pick-and-roll team uber alles and Parsons would be the triggerman.

Without DeAndre and with Tyson Chandler leaving for Phoenix rather than waiting around to see what happened, Dallas lacked the rim-protector/rim-runner required to run the spread pick-and-roll. They opted for a more traditional system built around playing Dirk and Zaza on the elbows, occasionally posting them up and running a lot of cutters off them and allowing them to make plays out of the high post. It has worked well enough but it’s not the way to get the most out of Parsons - he has no natural pick-and-roll partner and he doesn’t have a lot of room to attack the lane with Zaza in the middle.

To be sure, the biggest reason for his numbers declining across the board this season is his slow recovery from “hybrid microfracture” knee surgery in the off-season, which the Mavs repeatedly insisted was not a big deal but has obviously affected his explosiveness and his athleticism. Those were never the strengths of Prasons game in the first place so he really can’t afford to lose any amount of lift and still be the same player in terms of being able to finish at the rim and defend in space. It has only been in the last few weeks that the medical staff took off his minutes restrictions and he returned full-time to the starting line-up.

With Parsons shaking off the rust and close to full strength for the first time this season, the big question the team needs to figure out is just how much more they can get out of him. His per-game numbers are down because of his limited minutes but even his per-36 minute averages this season - 13.5 points, 5.2 rebounds and 3.6 assists a game on 45/32/54 shooting - show a player who hasn’t been able to outgrow the secondary role he had in Houston.

The biggest key is pairing him with a center who can protect him on defense and catch and finish above the rim, attacking the defense vertically and giving him room to maneuver in the pick-and-roll. The one player on the roster whose skill-set fits that description is JaVale McGee, who has been recovering from an injury of his own and who has only recently began to get minutes in Carlisle’s rotation. To say McGee has been uneven is an understatement but he has flashed the ability to take over games in spite of his general unawareness of what is happening around him and his conditioning, which still leaves a lot to be desired.

Nevertheless, Parsons has been a more effective player with McGee instead of Zaza:

Parsons (nbawowy.com) w/Zaza w/McGee FG% 45.0 48.9 Points per possession 1.02 1.09 Usage rating 18.7 21.1

“I really like playing with JaVale and the lob threat is a game changer for us,” said Parsons. “That’s not taking anything away with Zaza because he’s playing unbelievable but when Javale rolls and I’m handling the ball it gives our team another look. When pulling out shooters, him diving to the rim just opens up the whole floor for us.”

The problem is that while Parsons is more effective playing with McGee the team is far more effective with Zaza. The Mavs' offensive rating is +3.7 points better with Zaza on the floor and is -5.5 points worse with McGee. Neither of their centers is bringing much to the table defensively at the moment - their defensive rating is -2.8 points worse with Zaza and -1.3 points worse with McGee - but the numbers show that Zaza has been the better player on the whole.

One interesting twist that Carlisle could try is playing Parsons at the PF with McGee at the C and three perimeter players around them. That was the line-up they used to stun the Pelicans in New Orleans last week when they were without Dirk, Williams, Matthews and Zaza, all of whom were given the game off in the second night of a back-to-back following a 2OT win. Parsons had 21 points, 8 rebounds and 7 assists on 16 shots while McGee had 8 points, 6 rebounds and 4 blocks in only 19 minutes. Playing them both in max space unleashes the strengths of their games and presents a lot of match-up problems for the other team.

At 6’10 230 with a 6’9 wingspan, Parsons doesn’t have the size of a traditional PF but he’s more than big enough to play the position given the way the league is trending. The Golden State Warriors won a championship playing Harrison Barnes as a PF and Parsons is probably better off defensively giving up size as a 4 than giving up speed as a 3. On the other end of the floor, putting the ball in his hands with a hyper-athletic big man rolling to the rim and three fast shooters around him forces the defense to give up something on every possession, whether it’s the lob, the shot off the dribble or the three-point shot off the pass.

Over the last two seasons, Dallas has been very effective when Parsons has been able to play a featured role in the offense. According to Bobby Karalla of Mavs. com, they are 15-2 when he gets at least 10 points, 4 rebounds and 4 assists in a game, they are 6-1 when he gets 50+ touches in a game this season and they are 10-0 when he gets 5+ assists. The thing is that he’s not the type of dominant player who can just take over a game regardless of whose around him - he has to play with a very specific set of players that allow him to leverage his skills and take over games at the NBA level.

They will have the money to chase a number of different players in the offseason but if they want to get the most out of Parsons they should be targeting another 3-and-D player at SF and a better version of McGee at center (maybe Hassan Whiteside?). They have committed to building around Parsons and they don’t really have any other options on the roster in terms of future building blocks. The question now is just how good a team can be built around him.