Three's A Crowd

THE LOVE IS so thick in the Dallas Mavericks' locker room these days you can cut it with Shawn Bradley's femur. Ask Dirk Nowitzki how he feels about sacrificing so much of his offensive game, and he'll tell you that Antawn Jamison is the real hero for accepting a sixth-man role. Ask Jamison about coming off the bench, and he'll talk about Michael Finley's leadership. Ask Finley about his positive influence, and he'll talk about Antoine Walker's unselfishness. Ask Walker about his magnanimity, and he'll talk about how he studies the moves of Steve Nash, the All-Star point guard whose position he sometimes assumes.

Yes, it's clear that the Mavs, armed with more shooters than an NRA convention, including newcomers Walker and Jamison, want to convince the skeptics—and perhaps themselves—that you can't have too much of a good thing. Halfway through this season, have the Western Conference finalists from 2002-03 accomplished that?

"With all the weapons they have, they are a very, very scary team," says Los Angeles Lakers assistant coach Frank Hamblen. "They're better than last year."

"They're not that good, and I don't think they're going as far as they did last season," says the Lakers' head coach, Phil Jackson.

Well, there you have it. The diametrically opposite views of two coaches from the same organization underscore the divergent opinions about the Mavericks, who at week's end had won eight straight, including a 108-99 home victory over the Sacramento Kings on Sunday, a wild shootout that Dallas ended with an 11-2 run. From the start of the season players, coaches and owner Mark Cuban have tossed around phrases like we've still got a ways to go and work in progress, sounding as though they were describing an intricate building project in downtown Dallas. Which, in a way, they were. But the streak suggests to some—certainly to the Mavs—that construction is proceeding apace, and that this trigger-happy bunch (28-16 at week's end) is ready to resume its place among the Western superpowers.

Sunday's win aside, the weight of evidence lies with the Jacksonian view, though Dallas (like Sacramento) deserves high praise for playing up-tempo hoops in a league stuck in first gear. On paper—a phrase used frequently when discussing the Mavs—the addition of 6'9" forwards Walker and Jamison should more than compensate for the loss of backup point guard Nick Van Exel. (That was the net effect of two blockbuster transactions Dallas made before the season.) But the personnel changes have exacted a price, most notably a reduction in the effectiveness of the Mavs' best player, Nowitzki, who, like Walker and Jamison, plays power forward. Adding the latter two players was tantamount to trying to upgrade a supermarket by stocking the shelves with more of the same product, high-quality though it might be.

Moreover, Van Exel was the team's Tasmanian devil, a fearless competitor who gave a hard edge (particularly in last year's playoffs) to a team overloaded with nice guys. Jamison, who came from Golden State, collects figurines of angels; he has more than 100 of them, his favorite being a mother angel watching over her child. Van Exel, now a Warrior, collects scalps. "There is no one on our team right now with Nick's competitive temperament," says swingman Finley.

There is also the issue of how change has affected Dallas's defense, which can be described in one word. That word is sucks. Last season Alias (ongoing joke—the team has no D) was actually a middle-of-the-pack defensive team that made spot adjustments in its zone and got solid defense from role players such as Adrian Griffin and Raja Bell, both now departed, and rugged forward Eduardo Najera, who has been out for three weeks (and counting) with a sore left knee. Through Sunday the Mavs ranked 28th in points allowed (99.6) and 26th in opponents' field goal percentage (45.2) and had all but given up playing down-and-dirty man-to-man, a staple of title teams.

Most of the time the Mavericks can be found, like your average high school team, in a 2-3 zone, sliding their feet and keeping their hands up, unable to zero in on open shooters or lock down intruders in the lane. "Change requires time on defense," Nash said after a practice last week, "so we've had to stay really basic. Also, if you're relied on to be a scorer, you can't always be relied on to do the defensive dirty work." He smiled and scooped a chunk of pineapple into his mouth. "Plus, we're not exactly loaded with stoppers." (To address that, president of basketball operations Donn Nelson talked to the Portland Trail Blazers last month about 6'11" Rasheed Wallace, who, just by showing up, would have become the Mavs' best defender. Talks never got beyond the preliminary stage.)

Whether you're in awe of their firepower or disdainful of their softness, the Mavericks are always entertaining. The face of the franchise continues to be Cuban, utterly comfortable in tight blue jeans and dark-blue Mavericks pullover, the rock-star-owner livery he wore to the United Center in Chicago last Friday. It was a homecoming for both Finley and Walker, but it's a safe bet that Cuban signed more autographs than they did before and after Dallas routed the Bulls 106-93. Give the man credit for having some restraint though: When Dennis Rodman, a Cuban experiment that failed spectacularly during the 1999-2000 season, came out of retirement last month to join the Long Beach Jam of the American Basketball Association, Cuban didn't pick up the phone.