By Mike Fisher -- DallasBasketball.com
      Short is in.
      Don’t believe me? Look around. ... or rather, look down.
      On TV, you have a midget dating show one night and a relay team of tiny sprinters racing a camel the next. In music, you have Prince emerging from his shoebox to make an appearance at the Grammys and you have MTV giving a series to Carmen Electra (yes, the DB.com staff has partied with her; she fits into my front pocket, which, now that I think about it, ain’t such a bad idea). In movies, you have go-to-guy Tom Cruise, the biggest man in Smallywood.
      And with the Mavs, playing Tuesday at Memphis in their first game following the All-Star Break, you have their smallest stud, Steve Nash.
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      Things sometimes get a little twisted with Nash. Some of the numbers, as wonderful as they are, aren’t widely recognized. (Example: He’s the league’s No. 1 field-goal-percentage guy in the final two minutes of games, and unless you watch this team nightly, you wouldn’t guess it.) Some of the vibes are wonderful, too; in this 109-92 loss to the Grizzlies, Dallas really only played as if it was in control of itself when Nash was running the show.
      Steve himself likes to keep things a bit twisted. He’s listed at 6-3, but even with all the fuller-body mousse in the Mavs’ locker room, he’s closer to 6-1. He likes to go along with the myth that he cannot dunk, helping to give him a “White Men Can’t Jump’ advantage over foes who discover – too late! – just how athletically gifted he truly is..
      And in all the numbers and all the vibes and all the twisting, there is a tendency to get carried away, which brings us to good ol’ Charley Rosen. Remember Charley? He’s the hack who caught on at ESPN.com last year and forged a boring and repetitive path by using his column to constantly praise Phil JackZen and bash Kobe and LeBron and pretty much anyone else younger and more successful than Charley himself.
      Well, Chuck has resurfaced. He’s done a piece for The Sporting News in which he says Nash is the NBA player who’s game most closely resembles Larry Bird’s.
      Huh?
      Again, Mavs followers will take positive strokes anywhere we can get them, especially in the wake of what became a blowout loss to Memphis, a team suddenly breathing down Dallas’ Western Conference standings neck.
      But outside of the fact that Nash and Bird are both heavy on the hair and light on the pigmentation, I’d have to call this a reach.
      Nash is like Bird? Yeah, kinda. And Tom Brady is like O.J. Simpson, and Sammy Sosa is like Tom Seaver, and Play-Doh is plutonium, and haven’t you ever noticed the similarities between Earl Boykins and Bill Walton?
      Can we bring this down to earth, please?
      Not to pick on Nash (again, this wasn’t his fault), but he and the Mavs experienced a typical (for this night) un-Birdlike moment in the final quarter, as this thing was wasting away. Despite a second-quarter 9-0 run (led by scrubs Danny Fortson and,in his return debut, Eduardo Najera) and a lead held three minutes into the third, the Mavs found themselves down, 90-76, with 9:44 remaining.
      The Mavs inbounded following a made basket. Against token pressure, the usually reliable Nash fumbled the ball, nearly kicked it out of bounds, and then couldn’t race it upcourt in time to avoid an 8-second violation.
     Now, the Grizzlies are capable of stifling defense. When Dirk Nowitzki started going off, James Posey harassed him effectively. When Michael Finley finally started getting untracked, Bonzi Wells unleashed his malevolence. And causing trouble against Nash was Memphis backup guard Earl Watson.
      But boys, you gotta be able to get the ball up the floor!
      Mavs telecasters Matt Pinto and Bob Ortegel both attempted to frame this loss in philosophical terms. Matt suggested the officials’ whistles weren’t going Dallas’ way. Bob suggested that this loss could be filed away to use as revenge.
      Good try at attempting to explain this loss by adding some gravitas to incidents within it. But this wasn’t about big things. This was about Littlest Groom things, about camel-racing things, about Tom Cruise-sized things, about being able to bring the ball up the floor.
      This – all the way down to the Mavs’ smallest stud – was about the little things.