Relief

While I was thinking throughout the day on Wednesday about how I should critically attack the Mavericks through the written word, the unthinkable happened - they beat the back-to-back defending champions. Pretty decisively (enough to have a 16-point lead at one point). In the fourth quarter. This is great. It ends the worst streak the Mavericks have been on since Dirk's hair looked like this. It showed Jason Kidd and Jason Terry have pulses and that Dallas can beat one of the best teams in the league even without Dirk being, well, Dirk. But there's a caveat: the Mavs didn't play all that particually well on defense. As Rob Mahoney points out, it's nice to see the Mavericks win and against a great team, but holding the Lakers to a 120 points per 100 possessions isn't going to cut it. Dallas was hot from deep, played some decent defense in the third quarter and stopped the bleeding.

In a way, the Mavericks during the six game losing streak were having an erection lasting longer than four hours. On Wednesday they went an saw the doctor to get it taken care of. But that doesn't mean another four hour erection isn't on the way. Dallas still has their problems and if you can forgive the worst analogy I've ever written (or the best), the Mavs still need to string together consecutive competitive games before we can finally declare them "back." As Mark Followill said on 1310 The Ticket this afternoon, tonight against Chicago will be the real test to see if the Mavs are back. After all, he said, if this team couldn't get up to play the defending champs at home after a rough stretch, then nothing would.

Last night was a great night for a Maverick fan. But it wasn't the solution to the last week or so of problems. As some have mentioned, it was almost expected. There's still the issue of the small forward spot (Peja?), why Shawn Marion can't start, is DeShawn Stevenson coming back to earth (yes) and how is this team even doing this well with a starting point guard hitting 33 percent of his shots entering last night's game?

There will be a time and place for all the criticisms of this Maverick team to be laid out over here and to plan for what to do before the trade deadline. And by no means have the Mavericks fixed any of those after last night's game. But it was a nice change a pace. Instead of listening to talking heads and writers squawk at the sinking ship that is the Mavericks, we were temporarily relieved. Consider me thrilled.

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