Mavs in My Hometown
From My Hometown - Denton, Texas (ESPN)
Mavs start a new with experience as teacher
DENTON,
Texas — You head north out of Dallas, drive through an old college
town affectionately known as Little D and finally wind your way onto
campus some 45 miles later, expecting to find Camp Heartbreak.
What you find instead is Mavericks guard Jason Terry, upbeat as always, confronting his team’s NBA Finals unraveling in the only manner he knows.
Pulling up his new socks, that is.
"Look
down at my ankles," Terry said proudly, pointing to the black
crew-lengths he was wearing … black crew-lengths with a gold Larry
O’Brien Trophy for a logo.
"I got tons of these socks. The
Finals are always on me, always on mind, everywhere I go. I wear these
just to remind me of what’s at stake."
This being the quirky
Terry, you believe him. This is a guy who wears five pairs of socks
inside his sneaks every game. So you don’t doubt that Terry is too
excited about the new acrylic on his feet to be haunted by Finals
nightmares or burdened by the weight of his new $58 million contract.
Then again …
This
being October, firm conclusions are risky. The obvious disclaimer here
is that, even though visitors to the Mavericks’ training camp have
struggled to identify traces of a playoff hangover, it’s still early.
We won’t really know how Terry and the rest of Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavs respond to those four straight losses to Miami until playoffs start in the spring, which is ages away.
"I
still go through it in my head," Nowitzki said. "One of my last nights
in Germany [last month], I was trying to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. I
was thinking about the free throw I missed [late in Game 3], about
different situations that happened in that series. I’ll never forget
it. It’s going to stay in my mind until we win it all."
Said Mavs
coach Avery Johnson: "I see a lot of experience on this team, lots of
depth. This is a different team, but a little older, maybe a little
wiser.
"We’ll see if we’re good enough. Experience is a great teacher. But we’ve got a lot of unanswered questions."
The list isn’t that
long, actually, but there are more than one or two unknowns. Can the
Mavs even get out of the brutal West again? Can they maintain their
newfound status as Texas champions in the roughest state on the NBA
map? Can they hold off the Spurs and Rockets just to win their
division? Can they relocate the poise that, before it went missing
against Miami, won them a Game 7 on the Spurs’ floor? Can they finally
admit to themselves, after all their complaining in the Finals, that
they squandered a 2-0 series lead and a 13-point edge late in Game 3
because they weren’t ready to win it all?
As Johnson says, we’ll
see. We’ll see, for starters, how the Mavs handle an 82-game slog just
to get to the point where they can answer a lot of those doubts.
"I was just looking at it," said Mavs swingman Jerry Stackhouse,
who’s entering his 12th season. "I was counting the months. Where we
started the other day, it’s seven months before the fun part even
starts. In seven months, that’s the end of April. So this is a tough
time right now. We’ve got a grind in front of us. But that’s the NBA
season. We’ve all done it before, and I’ve done it a little bit more
than the others.
"We
know we can’t breeze through the season. There’s nothing automatic
about it. We’ve seen it before. A team like Minnesota, they make the
Western Conference finals and didn’t even make the playoffs [for the
past two seasons]. We feel like we’re better than that, but we
definitely don’t want to take our situation for granted."
That’s
why Johnson has hit the Mavs with a series of short-term goals to focus
on before they even get to the playoffs. Getting off to a good start is
priority No. 1. Winning the Southwest Division is No. 2. Securing the
No. 1 seed and home-court advantage throughout the West playoffs –
which they’ve never managed in franchise history, even last spring when
Dallas finally toppled San Antonio in the playoffs — is an ambitious
No. 3 that likely would come with the Southwest title.
Knowing
that the path back to the championship round will be even tougher is
also why the Mavs considered only playoff-tested additions to the
roster. Mike James
was their top free-agent target, but the Mavs managed to come out
deeper than they were after missing out on the edgy point guard. With
only one highly coveted trade piece (Marquis Daniels) and their $5.2 million salary-cap exception, Dallas managed to add three vets with Finals experience (Anthony Johnson, Austin Croshere and Devean George) and bring back defensive specialist Greg Buckner.
The Mavs wanted to get more athletic on the perimeter (Buckner and first-round pick Maurice Ager),
increase their shooting threat from outside (Croshere and George) and
bring in a dependable point guard (Johnson) who can allow Terry to
finish games at his preferred two spot. The result is a team that looks
as though, if the coach’s hunches are right, it won’t be exposed deep
in the playoffs like his ‘05-06 group.
"I don’t think you can get
there without guys that have been a part of [the Finals]," Johnson
said. "We didn’t have anybody that had been a part of it last time. I
was the only guy in the locker room who had been a part of one [except
for since-departed Keith Van Horn].
"Now
we’ve got seven or eight guys that have been in the Finals and we’ve
added three guys that have been to the Finals. We have seven or eight
guys that were on the floor [in June] and in the locker room crying
[after Game 6].
"I like how part of that is a bitter taste that
they have in their mouths. We have something that a lot of teams don’t
have, and that’s the experience of being there as a team. That’s why we
didn’t want to blow this team up."
Nowitzki calls it "a sour
taste," but they’re all in agreement on one thing: One implosion was
plenty, thank you. The Mavs who reconvened on the University of North
Texas campus last week are grateful for their collective shot at
redemption, giving the impression that they’ll learn and grow from
their lost opportunity as opposed to backsliding.
Terry, not
surprisingly, believes it more than anyone, judging by the full-court
press he put on team equipment manager Al Whitley to get as many pairs
of those trophy socks as Whitley could score.
"Doubters are
nothing new for us," Stackhouse said. "People wondered if we could get
there. People wondered if we were even tough enough to advance past the
second round. This is just a different challenge."
October 12th, 2006 at 7:46 am
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