Injuries putting strain on Mavs
By EDDIE SEFKO / The Dallas Morning News
The Mavericks beat the odds for a while. But the NBA injury gods are like the casino. Sooner or later, they win.
When you're missing as many integral pieces as the Mavericks are, you can cheat fate for only so long. At some point, you will feel the pinch.
Consider the Mavericks pinched.
They have lost two of their last three games, and the absence of four of their top 10 players has certainly been a factor. They played poor defense Thursday night against Golden State and lost at the buzzer because they couldn't put together enough stops to open up any distance between themselves and the Warriors.
They got beat Sunday at New Jersey because they ran out of steam as healthy players tried to do more to pick up the slack.
Now, the Mavericks hit the road for four games. Two of them, including tonight's game in Atlanta, are against hopelessly lottery-bound teams. Then again, so was the game against Golden State.
"There's nobody we can just walk out and play a subpar basketball game against now and win," coach Avery Johnson said. "We're missing three starters."
For all practical purposes, he's right. Starters Josh Howard and Adrian Griffin remain sidelined with hamstring problems. Devin Harris is a reserve, but he was playing a starter's minutes before he went down with a thigh strain.
Hopefully, by the time the Mavericks get to the middle two games of this trip against championship contender Detroit and playoff-bound Cleveland, Keith Van Horn will be back from his knee injury. Griffin may not be far behind.
Not a moment too soon.
"Obviously, we're missing some of our best perimeter defenders," Dirk Nowitzki said. "We could have used Josh and Grif in the second half" against Golden State.
It was Jason Richardson who launched the buzzer-beating 3-pointer as the last of his 40 points that sent the Mavericks to their sixth home loss of the season against 30 wins. Richardson had 30 of his points after halftime, including 20 in the third quarter.
And then there were the three missed free throws in the final 30 seconds and a defensive rebound that Nowitzki threw away for a three-point play for Troy Murphy.
"We made a lot of mistakes in the last couple of minutes," Nowitzki said. "Hopefully, we'll learn from them."
It matters not: Perhaps it was fitting that the Warriors won on the buzzer-beater. Coach Mike Montgomery felt his team might have gotten a raw call on Derek Fisher's 3-pointer that went in with 5.1 seconds left. The shot was waved off when a foul was called, but it was the sort of play that often gets called as a continuation, with the shot counting and the player getting one free throw.
Should it have counted?
"It seems to me if Kobe Bryant was shooting it, it would have," Montgomery said.
Briefly: The Mavericks may have been clipped by Golden State on Thursday, but in the big picture they are far better off than the Warriors, who have been out of the playoff picture since the All-Star break. "They were playing loose and had nothing to lose," Johnson said. ... The Mavericks used Friday as a travel day, with only low-minute players required to work out.
C-SPAN will air an interview with Mavericks owner Mark Cuban at 7 p.m. Sunday, touching on a variety of subjects in his business and entertainment empire.
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