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]

Initially, I had no interest in posting anything about Josh Howard after his interview on the Michael Irvin show Friday afternoon in which he openly discussed his offseason marijuana use, and I’m still not interested in commenting on it. But I did come across something Saturday morning that I thought should be shared. Below is an excerpt from and a link to a blog entry done by Henry Abbott, the well known basketball blogger that originally interviewed Howard a year ago. The interview covered a lot of things, from Mark Cuban’s antics, to politics, to marijuana. True to form, the mass media took the drug comments and ran with them, which eventually culminated in Friday’s media circus. In this post, Abbott encourages his readers to go back and read the whole interview before passing judgment on Howard.

“On Saturday, an update to my story was in the Dallas Morning News (and subsequently on the Morning News Mavericks blog). That apparently inspired a radio interview in Dallas, that featured heavily on ESPN and elsewhere.

And now we’re in a situation where the marijuana part of the story has been separated from the “getting to know Josh Howard” part of the story. Whereas people who read the entire initial interview seemed to think Howard came off lucid and balanced. People who only know, essentially, that he told reporters he smokes marijuana occasionally in the off-season, probably think he’s just a nut.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Now, I’m fine with people debating the relative merits of marijuana. That’s probably healthy.

But I’m a little sad that people will judge Josh Howard by this one element of his character.

Especially when — what is the news here exactly? It’s hard to even find presidential candidates who haven’t done what Howard says he has done. The club of people who have smoked pot has membership in the millions. Has anyone here ever spent any time on a college campus? At a rock concert? I swear I smelled pot smoke in the bathroom at the Sixers game this very night.”

Find the full article and a link to the original interview here.