[jacktruth]

I'll back the spiral up. I thought some of the same things and hey, it's either discuss this or go back to work.

I do think that Dirk has flaws to his game that make him stoppable. He can't play the post well enough to beat bigger players and he's not fast enough to get around smaller players. You have to take advantage of mismatches with him, which takes good offensive coaching, which has certainly not been Avery's strength. For long stretches of the game, particularly with Stack and Jet in there, we were doing nothing but isolation plays.

There were times that we just lacked the ability to slow down McGrady.

However. . .
Dirk is far from being an offensive liability. We do have much better offenses this year. During the Houston game when I was thinking "too much isolation," they did some substitution, and they made the adjustments with different offensive looks.

They also made some adjustments by going to a zone and using Howard to guard McGrady at the point - 2 turnovers. And let's face it. Who doesn't lack the ability to slow down McGrady sometimes.

In the end, we won the game off great defense, and solid offensive execution. Yes, Houston did score some points on us. It happens every game. THey had some runs on us. Happens every game. But it seemed to me that no matter how good it looked like Houston was doing, we never seem to fall very far behind. This Mavs team puts constant offensive pressure on the opponent, much better than they did last year.

In the end, if the Houston game was the only game I saw this year (and it was), I would be pretty encouraged by our chances. We pretty much owned the 4th quarter. We owned Yao. We own the rockets.