Every year Nellie trys to rely on some piece of trickery to get the Mavs by. Nellie flat out believes that the Mavs can't beat the Lakers except by some trikery. Well he's wrong. If we would have started our best and scrappiest team we wouldn't have been down so far. All night long we exhausted ourselves trying to dig out of that initial hole.
With Dirk out, we needed Fin to have a great start. Fin had actually been doing better as of late. So Nellie, Stoopid Genius that he is, decides to start Fin out of position. Well once you're off its hard to get on. Nellie helped insure Fin didn't get off to start. Also with the potato as the starting center we're already really small. Nash Matches up on Payton is a bad disadvantage. We needed more size anywhere we could get it. So what does F#cking stupdid Nellie do? He starts a 6'2" midget instead of a 6'7" guy with super long arms or a 6'9" guy.
Personally I'd have started Jamison. At least we would have had a size advantage at 1 out of 5 positions. But know, Nellie wanted to make sure that LA had the advantage or was at least even at all 5 positions. This is dumb, dumb, dumb. With teams like the Fakers we can't afford to have slow starts. They're too good for us to play grab ass to start the game and believe that we can just come back at will. But Nellie believes in trickery instead of hard nosed play. What I would have given to have a real coach tonight. Give me a Jerry Sload and I guarrandamntee you this Faker domination in LA and of winning the season series would end or quite a few players would have their asses in a sling. Most likely both.
What we need is the basketball version of the Tuna. We need a coach with balls and plan that players believe in.