DALLAS — Between the few thousand empty seats and the $7 tickets on a Wednesday night inside the American Airlines Center, there ain’t much about the Dallas Mavericks to captivate a national, or local, audience.

That includes the return of All-Star Anthony Davis, who this week proved, again, when right, there are few who can guard the man.

This will all change when the L.A. Lakers come to town on Wednesday, April 9, and bring with them a Slovenian guard who used to play here. Tickets for the worst seat in the place to participate in the Luka Love Fest are going for $202 each.

A season of such optimism and hope of returning to the NBA Finals has been crushed with the reality of being handed a hard boiled egg on Halloween. That there is much of anything worth noting this season at all belongs to the players, and the head coach.

While fans want explanations, and preferably blood, from ownership and management, it’s been the players and the head coach who have trotted out each night to explain things they had nothing to do with. All of them have behaved admirably, and professionally, in the face of 100-mph winds.

Jason Kidd should be a top candidate for the NBA’s Coach of the Year award, and it would be a surprise if he receives a single vote. A coach who led his team to the play-in tournament season after it finished in the NBA Finals normally would be fired, but Kidd’s circumstances are exceptional.

The award will, and should, go to Detroit’s J.B. Bickerstaff. In his first year as the Pistons head coach, the team will go to the playoffs for the first time since 2019, and finish with a winning record for the first time since ‘16.

Bickerstaff is the landslide winner, but Kidd deserves positive chatter.

Since he was hired to replace Rick Carlisle after the 2021 season, kicking Kidd has become a favorite for Mavericks fans. He has been guilty of some curious combinations, in game decisions, and word choices, but overall you can’t knock the job he’s done since he was hired by former owner Mark Cuban.

According to his own GM, Kidd had no idea that Nico Harrison was exploring a potential trade of his best player since the start of the calendar year.

By the time the Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the L.A. Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis and Max Christie on Feb. 2, the team had already been beset with injuries. Name the player of note, and chances are good they had missed big chunks of the schedule to injury.

When Luka was traded, it changed the entire complexion of the team (and the league).

The first half of AD’s first game with the Mavs demonstrated a lineup with Davis and Kyrie Irving, and others, had the potential Harrison envisioned.

“We’ve seen it a little bit, in stretches, like my first game here,” Davis told a small gathering of reporters after the team’s win over Atlanta on Wednesday. “We won’t actually know because we’re missing guys. We’ll never know how good we really can be.”

Then AD suffered an injury that kept him out 18 games. During that stretch, Irving went down with a season-ending, franchise-changing ACL injury.

There is no way this team should be in anything other than the NBA lottery.

The Mavericks are currently 38-39, and will make the play-in tournament. Maybe they make it out of that little tourney and will face top-seeded Oklahoma City in the first round. The same Thunder they beat in the second round of the playoffs last season, when the Thunder had no answer for Luka.

Considering the circumstances, the play-in is free gravy on top of stale dog food. The type of wet dog food that’s been left out of the container for a week.

There is no bigger “What if” team this season than the Mavericks, and that’s after the trade. “What if” AD was healthy along with Irving, centers Dereck Lively and Daniel Gafford and forward P.J. Washington?

“You can’t play ‘What if.’ You get nothing out of it,” Davis said. “You play present basketball, whatever is in front of us. Whoever we have on the floor. Whoever we have active to play, that’s who we have. That’s who we can count on and roll with.

“The ‘What if’ game, we can go all the way to the Finals and lose if we had Kyrie. You focus on what we have in the locker room, stay together and make noise.”

That this team stayed together, and continued to play despite the circumstances, is a credit to Kidd. He could have easily lost his team, and or checked out himself.

The Memphis Grizzlies are in contention for the fourth seed in the Western Conference, and they fired coach Taylor Jenkins on March 28.

Whatever the Mavericks, or their jilted fans, wanted out of this season is burnt toast. This is now about being a pro.

Management made its moves, and Kidd and the players were left to make the best of them, which they have.

All of it should put Kidd in the conversation for Coach of the Year, because he’s never done a better job.

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