Road Diaries Revisited: Dallas

In the NBA, there are wins, and there are good wins.

Friday night was a good win for the Orlando Magic.

Yeah, yeah, I know -- the Mavs had not won a home game this season, and their record was 2-6. Plus, they blew a 19-point first quarter lead in Chicago the night before, reinforcing a season-long pattern of fading in the second half. According to the standings, the Mavericks are not very good. According to their own standards, they're horrible.

Doesn't matter. This was a good win.

It was a good win not just because it was the first time the Magic ever won in American Airlines Center, and not just because it snapped a ten-year Magic losing streak in Dallas. It was a good win because it gave head coach Stan Van Gundy some valuable ammunition to use for the rest of this season:

It proved that, as long as you keep competing, good things can happen. Or, as Magic Director of Communications George Galante put it succinctly in the hallway outside the locker room: "The difference was that we kept playing, and they didn't." Coaches say that kind of stuff every night, but now Stan has the DVD to prove it.

Orlando won that game on Friday night despite an atrocious first quarter and a complete inability to stop the Mavs from scoring in the paint. Dwight had his double-double, but it was relatively quiet. Jameer got red-hot in the second half, and Pietrus made some incredibly clutch plays in the final minutes. But for the most part, it was a dog of a game until those frantic exchanges in the fourth quarter, when the Magic capped a 15-point comeback to seal the deal.

The Dallas press has been all over the Mavericks as a team that cannot finish, and from my seat at center court, you could see the Mavs' shoulders drop when the Magic finally tied the game in the 4th. There was a palpable sense of "crap, here we go again" from the players as well as the fans. Now that, by itself, isn't enough to lose you a game. But if the opposition smells blood and starts to apply pressure -- in Friday's case, the Magic applied the screws by crashing the boards like it was the only reason they got on the plane in the first place -- well, you could be toast. And yea, verily, the Mavericks were toasteth.

Stan Van Gundy, who has been uncharacteristically bouncy ever since we got to Dallas, was in a suitably pleasant mood during his postgame comments, as one might imagine. Seeing as how the team had played like crap for the better part of three quarters, I posed my first question thusly: "Stan, if I had to guess, I would think that you liked the outcome but didn't enjoy the process."

To my surprise, he said that he had actually just finished telling his players that he was more proud of them for this win than for any other victory they had this season. Because they never stopped competing, you see. That's the kind of thing that a coach prays will register in his players' minds, ready to be retrieved the next time the chips are down and the boys are up against it. This little era of good feeling continued onto the team plane, where Stan was telling everyone to 'eat up,' like an Italian grandmother at Thanksgiving dinner.

(See, as soon as we step onto the plane, we are confronted with tray after tray of fruit, vegetables, sandwiches, and hot entrees, and everyone kinda picks out a plateful for the flight, and it's like a moving cocktail party without the cocktails, and have I mentioned lately how nice it is to travel with an NBA team?)

The team travels from hotel to arena to airport on two busses, one for the players and coaches and one for everyone else who travels, including broadcasters. I mentioned in a previous entry that Magic GM Otis Smith is on this trip, and for whatever reason, he has chosen to ride on the 'everybody else' bus everywhere we've been. I think it's a nod to his position as general manager; nobody wants to have the school principal looking over their shoulder during a field trip.

Anyway, I was one of the first ones out of the American Airlines Center, and Otis was alone in the back of the Everybody Else Bus. Before we rolled out for Love Field, I walked back there and asked him what's happening to the Mavericks this year. He said that Dallas players are having a hard time adjusting to new head coach Rick Carlisle's defensive principles as well as his offensive sets, of which he apparently has a million. It probably doesn't help that nobody on that roster is known as much of a defender, although they did put in the effort two years ago when they reached the Finals against the Heat.

Of course, that was with Avery Johnson as the head coach. Whom they fired, reportedly because Dirk Nowitzki didn't approve of him, and Dirk has the ear of Mark Cuban. In a related story, Cuban was going absolutely ballistic from his courtside seat over some non-calls in the fourth quarter, especially when Nowitzki had the ball and someone looked at him funny.

Look, it's great that Nowitzki and Cuban have each other's back, and I know Cuban has made a pile of money, and there's a lot about him that I truly admire. And hell, it's his damn team. But every once in a while, you have to wonder how much he's actually holding that franchise back. You'll never see Rich DeVos, Dr. Jerry Buss, or Mickey Arison yelling at a ref from the baseline, and that's probably a good thing.

So now it's on to Charlotte, and if this entry seems to ramble, it's probably because our late-night flight is just a wee bit bumpy and I'm just doing this to take my mind off of things like, oh, wind shear. It feels like we're off-roading in a 100-seat Humvee. This is one of those flights where, if there were kids on this plane, they'd be screaming their heads off right about now.

That said, I'd bet ten bucks that most of the players up front are knocked-out asleep. Damn them.

Nah, they deserve it. This was a good win.