The Mavericks are officially in trouble

March 24th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

The whole “Dallas hasn’t won a game against a winning team since the Jason Kidd trade” refrain is getting a little old, but it’s also undeniably true. The Mavericks traded whatever interior defense they used to have to get a balky Kidd, and the returns have been mediocre. More and more, it looks as if Dallas’ window was shut on them in last year’s playoffs, when The Bearded One of Whom We Do Not Speak took Dirk’s confidence and crushed it in his palm.And this was all before the Mavericks lost to the Spurs last night, and lost Dirk in the process.

“I fell awkwardly, and my left leg got caught underneath me,” Nowitzki said in a news release. As Cuban left the locker room toward his suite, he held up two fingers to indicate the weeks Nowitzki is expected to miss.

Working with that rough estimate, the Mavericks will face six or seven games in the next two weeks without their anchor. They are seventh in the Western Conference, two games ahead of ninth-place Denver. Moving up is looking less likely. The No. 6 Spurs are three games up and own the tiebreaker.

While I’d never call into question the accuracy of a Mark Cuban prediction on this Real Time Reporting site, two weeks seems pretty hopeful, given that this might not be an ankle sprain. But it’s not that Dirk’s injured — it’s that even if he wasn’t, the Mavs still look like a team limping to the finish. In this year’s West, Jason Kidd and Josh Howard and an overactive Avery Johnson just aren’t enough.

Quick Avery Johnson addendum: AJ has been accused of overcoaching far too often this year, which, after watching his appearance in Black Magic, is sort of baffling. Johnson’s interview for the documentary discussed about his time at Southern University and how his former coach’s system was free-wheeling and improvisational and fast-paced and still structured, and how much he liked that. After his playing career, Johnson went on to coach under Don Nelson, who is as free-wheeling as they come. So where does this current stuff come from?

I don’t mean this to sound as if Avery Johnson isn’t capable of independent thought, but it’s pretty clear he had to have gone outside of both his college experience and what one would assume was his defining professional mentorship to create his own slow, rigid style. Maybe 90’s basketball players are just destined to slow things down to a crawl. I still don’t get it.