More Friday afternoon time-wasters.  You’re welcome.

- Link of the Week: Charles Barkley loosely admits he’s a dumbass.  I hope whoever was responsible for this got a surious raise.

- If you didn’t hate the Yankees before, now there’s news that Derek Jeter has dated six women on Maxim’s Hot 100 list.  Whatever.  Call me when he’s dated six of the top 10.

- This isn’t a great article.  I was just shocked to see Stephen A. Smith take the, um, other side of a racial argument.  Although he did pose the question, but you take what you can get.

- Your weekly dose of Tim Cowlishaw pessimism.  Can you believe he isn’t happy with the Mavs apparent choice of Rick Carlisle as their next coach?

- Not to be outdone, the Star-Telegram’s Randy Galloway weighs in on who’s the right man for the Mavs.

- This is getting out of hand.  T.O.  Tank Johnson.  The Pacman.  Now Chris Henry wants to join the Cowboys?  Any chance of Jerry Jones luring O.J. out of retirement?

- Rockets’ future: Is there a point yet?  I certainly don’t see the point.  Decent article.  Funnier title.

- I can only hope that one day Papa John’s or some other pizza franchise insults my city.

- What’s this?  Two mentions of the Rockets?  This free agent wish list from Jonathon Feigen of the Houston Chronicle puts us over the top on our quota of Rockets content for the summer.

- There has never been a greater truster of his teammates in the history of professional sports than Kobe Bryant.  At least the idea’s funny.  It’s good to see Stephen Hawking keeps up with pro hoops.

- It’s never a bad time to revisit the Ultimate Professor Highlight Video.

Column: Huge Balls

     by Rob Stiller

**UPDATE** As of Thursday afternoon, the New York Post and Chicago Tribune are, respectively, reporting that the New York Knicks and Chicago Bulls are both interested in interviewing Avery Johnson and Mike D’Antoni in the next few days, assuming the latter becomes available.
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Upon their elimination from the NBA playoffs Tuesday night at the hands of the up-and-coming New Orleans Hornets, the down-and-going Dallas Mavericks officially embarked on their most significant offseason since 2004. But what is the appropriate course of action, and what will Mark Cuban and Donnie Nelson actually do to restore the Mavs to their elite status? At this point, there is no right answer, but big changes are clearly on the horizon, given the team’s dismissal of Avery Johnson Wednesday afternoon. There essentially exist three philosophical approaches that the organization could take, none of which are necessarily appealing to the fans, but all of which management will have to weigh in the coming weeks and months.

1. Stand pat
Probably the most distasteful approach to disgruntled Mavs fans everywhere is the possibility that Donnie and Cuban decide to give this group one last chance to make it to the top. And for a number of reasons, this scenario is a lot more likely than most sports media outlets would have you believe.

1. Cuban just signed off on one of the riskiest trades in franchise history, and Cubes isn’t the sort of guy that’s used to failure. And to clarify, trading Kidd now would be one big admission of failure. It certainly wouldn’t be difficult to sell the media on the “perhaps the team just didn’t have enough games together to find their chemistry will Kidd at the helm before the playoffs” explanation.
2. The team’s most valuable trade chip just caused a media raucous after discussing his affinity for smoking dro during the offseason, and compounded that with the worst playoff series of his career. Even if the Mavs are shopping Josh Howard, which, one can only assume they are, the logical move is to wait until next season when J-Ho has had a chance to remind the league exactly the Mavs were unwilling to part with him this season. Prematurely moving Howard would only hurt the Mavs and move them further away from the upper tier of the Western Conference.
3. The other big ticket item the Mavs have to work with, Jason Kidd’s expiring contract, will similarly increase in value the longer they hold on to it. That is, as next season’s trade deadline approaches, teams working to clear cap space for the 2010 LeBron James Sweepstakes would LOVE to take on Kidd’s 21.3 million (!) dollar expiring contract.
4. Beyond the two players already mentioned, the Mavs have a lot of undesirable (Terry, Stackhouse) or just plain bad (Dampier) contracts that are essentially immovable. That is, unless the team starts stripping parts and selling them off for pennies on the dollar in order to clear cap space down the road. [Read more]

(AP Photo/Donna McWilliam)

When Avery Johnson took over as the Mavs’ head coach four seasons ago, he made it one of his top priorities to help the team shed their reputation as being ‘soft’.  Generally speaking, he’s been successful, as the painfully witty Irk Nowitzki jokes began to recess and even Charles Barkley ceased to constantly berate the Mavs for their lack of toughness.  Now the question has become, “What is Johnson going to do to help the team shed their reputation as ‘that team that always melts down in the playoffs?’”.

For two seasons, it was easy to diagnose the cause of the team’s postseason demise.  In 2006, it was a referee-induced meltdown.  In 2007, more so than drawing a hot Golden State team, it was the Mavs’ inability to get going again after playing a month’s worth of meaningless games.  Which brings us to 2008.

As someone who has followed the Mavericks as closely as anyone this season, watching the first four games of their first round series against New Orleans has left me in a state of disbelief.  The team that has taken the court starting with the second half of Game 1 has been wholly unrecognizable compared to the team that had built some solid momentum heading into the playoffs.  And the most frustrating part of such repulsive play for any Dallas fan in this series has to be the seeming lack of an explanation for such a poor performance.  Surely the media will say the team has been distracted by the attention Josh Howard’s comments induced prior to Game 3, which is entirely ludicrous.  To me, it comes down to a couple of things… [Read more]

For any casual UT fan, watching Texas get thoroughly beat down Sunday by Memphis would have been understandably frustrating. As a matter of pride, no one likes seeing their team get blown out. For a general college basketball fan with no real rooting interest, the game would have been understandably frustrating to watch because no one wanted to see another blowout this late in March. But for those of us who have followed the 2007-08 Longhorn basketball team closely all season, the game was frustrating because it was clear for most of the second half that this was the last time we would get to see this team play together.

Not since the 2002-03 Dallas Mavericks have I been so invested in a team. That was the first year my dad and I had season tickets and were at probably 35 of 41 home games. For those who have never experienced it, it’s hard to explain how attached you can get to a team watching them every night over the course of a season. Despite never getting within a hundred feet of any of the players, you start to feel like you know the team, which makes it personal when things go badly. And as time was running out on the Horns Sunday in Houston, it felt strangely similar to the fourth quarter of Game 6 of the 2003 Western Conference Finals.

[Read more]