NBA Game Preview - Dallas at Memphis

Fri Mar 31, 2017 8:00 PM EDT

Memphis Grizzlies guard Mike Conley knew he was going to have a big game right when his team really needed it.

"I could tell when we got off the plane from the trip," Conley said after Memphis, which hosts the Dallas Mavericks on Friday, returned home from an 0-4 road trip to beat the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday night.

"My mindset was it was a must win and I just wanted to make a statement not with my team, with just the coaches and the city, that we're not playing the basketball we need to be playing right now and we are better than this."

The Grizzlies' need was made greater by the absence of All-Star center Marc Gasol, who missed his third straight game.

Conley, who had a game-high 36 points on 13-of-21 shooting from the floor in the Grizzlies' 110-97 win, is averaging 23.4 points per game in March, the best month of his 10 years in the NBA.

"Since post-All-Star, he's been killing it," Memphis coach David Fizdale told the Commercial Appeal. "I know our record doesn't necessarily display him killing it. I know he doesn't care about the individual numbers, but you can see it. He's turning it up a notch.

"You know me, I love it. When I look at this score sheet and see this kind of box score from Mike Conley, I get excited to see that."

Conley has managed to avoid the nagging late-season injuries that have plagued him in the past.

"I feel like I'm back to where I was at the beginning of the year. I'm back to being reckless again," Conley told the paper. "I'm not worried about my back and all of the things that go along with that. That's one part of it. And having guys go in and out of the lineup kind of forced me to be more aggressive. That plays a part of it, too."

Memphis (41-34) is currently seventh in the Western Conference standings and appears safe for the postseason. The Grizzlies are 2 1/2 games behind the sixth-place Oklahoma City Thunder (43-31) and four games up on the eighth-place Portland Trail Blazers (37-38).

For the Mavericks (31-43), playoff aspirations are fading. Dallas sits 5 1/2 games behind Portland with eight games remaining.

The Mavericks have lost three in a row, including a 121-118 defeat at New Orleans on Wednesday, and they are just 3-7 in their past 10 games.

Undrafted rookie point guard Yogi Ferrell came off the bench to score 15 points in 24 minutes for Dallas, a bright spot for coach Rick Carlisle.

"He's demonstrating a real consistency with the level of force that he plays with," Carlisle told the team's website on Thursday. "Last night, he was a little unaggressive offensively in the first half, as I mentioned after the game, and in the second half he just said, '(Forget) it.'

"He just went hard, and he stepped into open shots. And when you have that kind of attitude and you're playing to your strengths, you can have a hot half like that. He's showing some abilities as a scorer and as a defender, and he does a little bit of everything. He's a guy that we like for a lot of reasons."