California’s Sacramento (AP) — Klay Thompson made amends for his poor performance in Sacramento a year ago by scoring 16 of his 23 points in Dallas’ strong second quarter, which helped the Mavericks defeat the Kings 120-106 on Wednesday night to move on to the Play-In Tournament.

Thompson scored four 3-pointers in Dallas’ 44-point second quarter to help the team win, even though he missed all ten shots in his final Golden State game, a play-in loss in Sacramento, one year ago. That made the game a farce and extended the Mavericks’ tumultuous season by at least one game.

“It’s human nature to want to come out and prove people wrong when a season ends on a bad note like that,” Thompson added. However, I felt I started the game well by attempting to dish, rebound, and play defence. After that, I got the shots.

Dallas, the eighth seed in the Western Conference, will play Memphis on Friday night for a postseason berth. The winner of that match will play top-seeded Oklahoma City on Sunday to begin the playoffs.

After making it to the NBA Finals the previous season, star point guard Kyrie Irving suffered a season-ending knee injury soon after that deal, putting an end to any realistic prospects of making it to the NBA Finals again.

“To put it mildly, we’ve had a turbulent season,” Thompson stated. “We’ve been hit by the injury bug like never before. However, we continue to play basketball in the postseason. If we travel to Memphis and put on another show like this, we can truly offer the city of Dallas some hope.

Thanks to consecutive 3-pointers from Thompson, Dallas jumped out to a 20–6 lead in the second quarter. To eliminate any drama, Thompson made two more 3-pointers later in the quarter as the Mavs increased their lead to 23 points at the half.

Davis, who led Dallas with 27 points, stated, “We were able to run, get stops on defence, and shot it very well.” “Offence was clicking.” In the quarter, we had—44? We opened up the game and played at a high speed.

The Kings had 33 points from DeMar DeRozan and 20 from Zach LaVine.

The Kings’ season ended disappointingly, as they moved standout point guard De’Aaron Fox to San Antonio in February and fired coach Mike Brown in December. All of these contributed to Sacramento missing the playoffs for the 18th time in 19 seasons, which raised concerns about the team’s future, beginning with interim coach Doug Christie’s position.