The Mavs don't play until Saturday, so as you'd expect there is not a lot of Mavs stuff out there today. Hopefully I can be creative over the next two days and come up with something.
The Kings game isn't the type of game the players wanted to have four days of rest to think about -- probably because Avery will be a pain in practice.
"There's going to be nights where you just can't get a stop," Dirk Nowitzki said. "But that one stop down the stretch is what we needed and usually we come up with that stop. That's definitely a tough one to sit on for four days."
-------------------Sefko writes about the Mavs trouble on the road this season (9-9), but Dirk isn't worried.
"I'm not even worried about the road," he said. "Good teams win on the road and at home. We had a tough start to the season on the road. But once we got back to playing our style and playing together and get everybody healthy - I'm not worried at all.
"We certainly have improved from what we were earlier. In November, there was no rhythm to our game on either side of the ball. We couldn't do anything offensively. The month of December was a step up, and we just have to keep on working. And hopefully down the stretch, we'll be a great team."
---------------------"We certainly have improved from what we were earlier. In November, there was no rhythm to our game on either side of the ball. We couldn't do anything offensively. The month of December was a step up, and we just have to keep on working. And hopefully down the stretch, we'll be a great team."
Ian Thomsen has an article at SI.com about Dirk regaining his MVP form that wasn't really there at the start of the season. It's a pretty good read, but the most interesting part to me was actually about Josh Howard.
There's nothing out there that he can't do now -- he can shoot threes, he's still a great slasher, he's posting up more now and we all know what he brings defensively for us,'' Nowitzki said. "Sometimes early in November I was getting caught watching him. But if we're both in attack mode and playing well together, I think we're a different animal.''
You always hear quotes from fringe NBA players talking about the time they played with Jordan or Kobe etc... and would just watch them while they were on the court. That makes sense. But here is the reignin MVP saying part of his inactivity and lack of form was was caused by him just watching a teammate play. I don't know if that says more about Howard or Nowitzki, but it's definitely fascinating.--------------------
This Day in Mavs History
1981 Won consecutive games for the first time in team history.