By Mike Fisher -- DallasBasketball.com
Some of us are ‘the-glass-is-half-full’ people. Others are ‘the-glass-is-half-empty’ people. But if you think anything good came of the Mavs’ 113-100 loss at San Antonio on Friday, you are a ‘the-glass-is-full-of-crap’ person.
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Dallas charged back to within five after being down 28 almost all game, showing some never-say-die guts? Great. Neat.
Dallas’ Michael Finley retaliated against cheap-shot defender Bruce Bowen, continuing to battle the club’s ‘Soft White Boyz’ image? Cool. Wonderful.
Dallas still has a season-series edge on the Midwest rival Spurs in the race for a favorable postseason berth? Fine. Whatever.
It's still 0-for-2 in two tries in three days against the clubs Dallas is chasing.
This week’s visits to Minnesota and San Antonio were statement games for the winners. The Mavs were manhandled in both showdowns – in San Antonio against a Spurs team that did it without superstar Tim Duncan.
When you go against the likes of these guys, even without Tim Duncan, if you don't bring your 'A' game to San Antonio, you're going to end up leaving this city with a loss," said Mavs assistant Donnie Nelson. "That's exactly what happened."
And that is the real story here.
Not the comeback, which featured a 40-point fourth quarter against a Spurs team that does tend to at times choke its way down the stretch of games. Not the 3-1 record against the Spurs, which might come in handy if 11-18 road team Dallas ever gets its act together when away and finds itself in a regular-season-tiebreaking crunch with the Spurs. And no, not even the Finley-vs.-Bowen duel, which happened like this:
With less than three minutes left in the third quarter, the Mavs were beginning a mini-run. Finley – joining Danny Fortson as the only Mav who didn’t seem in some sort of three-quarters-long trance -- was attempting to take over the game. With 29 minutes of burn, Finley had scored 19, and the Mavs were inching toward cutting the deficit to 20.
Said Fortson: “Mike was our hot guy. And he [Bowen] was going to come in there and nail him."
After a Mavs miss, San Antonio looked to rush the ball upcourt. Finley was chasing Bowen from behind and looking for the ball when Bowen turned, stopped, and blindsided Finley, his elbow and shoulders helping to bury the Mav.
"We both bumped one another," Bowen said. "He hit me, and I hit him. That's the gist of it. I saw him coming, and he saw me. But I didn't know he would do it right in front of the official."
Bowen is a fine defender but one who in recent days has raised the ire of Ray Allen and now Finley for dirty play. Allen (who says Bowen is a ‘sissy’) and Finley (who says he’s a ‘coward’) on one side of a reputation-based argument and Bowen on the other? Bowen loses, especially when he fibs when describing the play.
Finley did not see Bowen stop and plant himself. Saying they ‘both bumped one another’ is like saying a hammer and nail ‘both hit each other.’ And Bowen is going dyslexic with the ‘he hit me and I hit him’ thing. It was the other way around.
Said Finley: "He gave me a cheap shot from behind, and I retaliated. Obviously they missed the first one. It was away from the play. I was just going back down the court, and he came up from behind and gave me an elbow to the ribs. I'm a man first. I went down and told him it's not going to be like that."
And that’s when Finley gathered himself from the floor, chased down Bowen, and shoved back, in an act that was both manly and gentlemanly, for Finley opted not to take a swing, or wrassle, or wait until Bowen was in a vulnerable position. Finley ought to be applauded (maybe as opposed to suspended) for his rather gentile push back.
Summarized Fin: "A coward guy made a coward play.’’
Maybe Finley’s chest-hairy play, and the ejections of him and coach Don Nelson, inspired Dallas, because the Mavs did rush back into this thing. They were down just 95-90 with 2:56 to play before running out of gas. Maybe, you say, the Mavs can take something of value from that.
But note the 24-point loss at Minnesota on Wednesday which featured some insulting grandstanding by the T-Wolves. Wasn’t that supposed to inspire some road-warrior pride in these Mavs?
We’ve now got consecutive Dallas losses for the first time in a month-and-a-half. We’ve now got Ervin Johnson and Bruce Bowen as poster children for Mavs revenge. The bulletin board is half-full.
Me? I’d rather the glass, the bulletin board, this road trip, whatever, be half-full of some victories.