Texas Rivals Are Older, Wiser and Tough as Ever
By Jonathan Abrams
The New York Times
DALLAS — Over the last few seasons, the Dallas Mavericks have changed their point guard, their coach and a sizable chunk of their roster as they tried to keep the window to a championship propped open.
The San Antonio Spurs have been disregarded so many times that they can now be included among the living dead, even though they still possess their three big mainstays: Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili.
On Thursday night, these two longtime Texas rivals, both playing better than expected this season, intersected again. The Spurs won, 99-93, but with an asterisk, since the Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki was out with a sprained right knee. And while the victory gave the 28-4 Spurs a three-and-a-half-game lead over the 24-7 Mavericks in the Southwest Division, the overall feeling is that this season’s battle between the teams has only begun.
The Spurs have the best record in the N.B.A.; the Mavericks are second, tied with Boston. More significant, San Antonio and Dallas are making the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers appear vulnerable in the Western Conference for the first time since they obtained Pau Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies in 2008.
“It looks that way,” said Donnie Nelson, the Mavericks general manager, who paid close attention as the Spurs trounced the Lakers, 97-82, on Tuesday in San Antonio. “The Lakers certainly haven’t been firing on all cylinders. That being said, they always seem to get things right come playoff time. That’s the expectation.”
Expectations, of course, do not always pan out. Few, for instance, thought the aging Mavericks and the aging Spurs would be so dangerous this season. Fewer still would have expected the way they have gone about it.
Dallas, traditionally an offensive juggernaut and never renowned for its defense, is stopping opponents with an innovative matchup zone.
“In past years we did everything offensively and we were considered a soft team,” Mavericks guard Jason Terry said. “That’s way behind us now.”
San Antonio, traditionally a defense-first team with Duncan as the pillar of a deliberate offense, can resemble the up-tempo Phoenix Suns on some nights.
“The normal thing when you think about San Antonio is they’re going to walk it up sometimes and go into the big fellow, but they’re getting up and running and putting up a lot of points,” Mavericks guard Jason Kidd said.
San Antonio is averaging an N.B.A.-best 112.5 points per 100 possessions, according to
Basketball-Reference.com.
Its 40.2 percent shooting percentage on 3-pointers entering Friday’s games was also a league best.
“It seems like every year someone writes them off,” Nelson said. “My reaction is, you don’t know Gregg Popovich and Tim Duncan that well.”
Popovich, of course, is the longtime coach who has led the Spurs to four N.B.A. championships (1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007), each of them with Duncan playing a key role.
Duncan is no longer the focal point of the offense and is posting career lows in points and rebounds. Either San Antonio is adjusting to his age — he will be 35 in April — or pacing him for the playoffs, or both.
Meanwhile, Parker and Ginobili are healthy and Richard Jefferson is finally acclimated in his second season with the team.
Forward DeJuan Blair, in his second year, and guard George Hill, in his third, contribute nightly.
This season’s annual diamond-in-the-rough find for San Antonio is Gary Neal, an undrafted 6-foot-4 guard from Towson University who spent several years playing overseas. He led the Spurs in scoring during a recent three-game span and made five 3-pointers Thursday against the Mavericks, nullifying Kidd’s triple-double.
“I’m still not buying it,” a tight-lipped Popovich said when asked about his team’s scoring surge. “That’s the truth, that’s the truth. I don’t know what else to tell anybody. That’s not who we are. I don’t know how we score. I have no clue.”
Popovich even talked down the Spurs’ victory on Thursday, saying afterward that “we didn’t improve much as a team, that’s for sure.”
In contrast, Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle was upbeat despite his team’s second straight loss, both at home and both without Nowitzki.
“Our guys kept battling,” he said.
Still, those battles are all uphill without Nowitzki, who at 32 remains the Mavericks’ anchor and is again producing numbers worthy of an N.B.A. most valuable player.
In 29 games this season, he is averaging 24.1 points. His shooting percentage (54.5) is the best of his career.
The roster that now surrounds him includes a future Hall of Famer (Kidd), two former All-Stars (Caron Butler and Shawn Marion), a former sixth man of the year (Terry), and a gold medalist from last summer’s world basketball championships (Tyson Chandler).
In the West, every move is made with the Lakers in mind. And with Chandler, acquired in an off-season trade with the Charlotte Bobcats, and with Brendan Haywood at center, the Mavericks have one player (Haywood) who can pound with the Lakers’ Andrew Bynum and another quick enough (Chandler) to keep Gasol away from the basket.
Dallas has been limiting opponents to 93.3 points, sixth best in the league and 6.0 points fewer than they allowed last season. The 7-foot-1 Chandler is a linchpin of the defense, and Carlisle is using his matchup zone more this season after slowly installing it the past two years.
The zone contains elements of man-to-man, and Dallas can use it most of the game or as infrequently as several possessions.
“We like to call our zone ‘amoeba’ because we don’t even know what we’re doing in it,” Terry joked.
Zones are sometimes frowned upon in the N.B.A. Their detractors say they take accountability away from individual players and are susceptible to illegal defense calls. Carlisle was originally hesitant to use one, he said, but the matchup zone is ideal for his personnel, a blend of savvy, veteran players.
“It’s a complex defense,” Carlisle said. “The perception is that zone is probably an easier defense to play than man-to-man. Nothing could be further from the truth. Zone is more difficult. It requires a lot more communication.”
Over three decades, the Mavericks have never won a championship. They have had some great starts but not necessarily the greatest finishes.
They reached the N.B.A. finals as their conference’s fourth-seeded team in 2006 and lost to Miami; were upset by Golden State in the first round as the top-seeded club in 2007; and finished nearly every place in between in qualifying for each postseason over the past decade.
Meanwhile, the Mavericks and the Spurs have met in the playoffs five times in the last decade and San Antonio won three, including last season’s first-round confrontation, which the Spurs won in six games.
“I think it’s one of the top rivalries in any sport in the state of Texas,” Mark Cuban, Dallas’s owner, said in an e-mail message. “I know the players on both teams respect each other and in many years have a strong dislike for each other come playoff time. But outside the state of Texas, people could care less. It’s up there in national interest with Indiana versus Purdue in football.”
Perhaps Cuban was being sarcastic, but he had a point.
If the Spurs and the Mavericks emerge as the strongest teams in the West this season, their Texas rivalry — staged from a distance of about 270 miles — will receive attention beyond the state’s borders. At this point, neither can shake the other and exhale.
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