No mercy for Mavs from Nash
By Jim Reeves
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
DALLAS - Lock your doors and bolt your windows, there's a cold-blooded serial killer in town.
He looks like an aging skateboarder, with scraggly long hair, sloppy T-shirts and eyes as soft and soulful as Elsie the Cow, but don't let that wouldn't-hurt-a-fly disguise trick you.
He is an assassin from the soles of his basketball sneakers to the crown of that wet, sweaty head.
The Mavs, of all people, should know that by now. He's slit their throats before, you might recall.
Anyone who believes that Steve Nash is going to wear out, that he's suddenly going to come down with an aching back or that he'll eventually be too tired to run needs to come back from Never-Never Land.
Because I'm here to tell you that that's never, never going to happen.
He's here to stay, and by tonight, the Mavs had best have figured out a way to deal with him and the rest of the run-and-gun Phoenix Suns.
Nash is the guy who makes the Energizer Bunny look like your lazy Uncle Jake in the backyard hammock.
The Suns, who stunned the Mavs in Game 1 Wednesday night, are not going away easily. They're not going to slow down. They're definitely not going to quit running.
Tonight we find out whether the Mavs have finally quit vacationing on the River Walk and realize that they haven't won anything yet.
"Maybe we should come down from our last series and understand that we're playing against a totally different opponent, and we have to adjust to the tempo of the game to a couple of different situations quickly," said a still obviously upset Avery Johnson after practice Thursday.
What was he upset about?
"Where do I start?" he asked. "That was our second worst defensive game of the season."
(Trivia--after he said this, a reporter asked which game was their worst defensive game of the season, and AJ couldn't come up with an answer. 
)
Then he repeated two words five times for emphasis.
"Transition defense. Transition defense. Transition..."
OK, coach, we got it.
In plain language, it means get your butts back down the court and play defense.
But how do you stop the unstoppable? How do you defense a circus acrobat like Nash, who shoots and passes with either hand, who is uncanny at finding the open man, who can somehow contort his body to get a shot off while off-balance, while falling, while pinned behind the basket?
How do you stop a cold-blooded assassin whose sole mission in life is to kill you stone dead, to slice you into little pieces and ship you home in a refrigerated box?
He scored 27 points and dished out 16 assists in Game 1 and, frankly, I'm worried that he's just warming up.
"We have to challenge him more," Avery suggested. "He just had too many free runs [Wednesday] night. Too many free runs to the basket, not enough body contact, and we have to try to make him play defense more.
"There are a couple of different things we can do against a really good player like that."
If that's the case, tonight would be a good time to trot them out, because most of us have pretty much lost faith in this idiotic theory that he'll eventually just be too tired to play any more.
We've been waiting for that to happen since May of last year, as I recall, and he's still running his old team - and any other that gets in his way - into the ground.
"He's playing phenomenal right now," Dirk Nowitzki said. "He's a two-time MVP. He showed all season long what he's capable of doing.
"I don't expect him to wear down. We expect to play him at this level all the time. We just have to do a better job of it."
Nash was a great player in Dallas. He's even better in Phoenix.
"I still see the same up and down the court. I still see the great passing, the great ball-moving ability, the ability to shoot and score," Mavs assistant coach Rolando Blackman said. "I just see him taking command more of the rest of his teammates.
"I see him pointing and talking more, I see him in a leadership role, as THE leader. He commands it out there. He's looking like it, and he's acting like it."
Blackman surprised me when I asked him what player of his era that Nash reminded him of.
"Magic Johnson," Blackman said. "Take away [Johnson's] height and the rebounds, and he's Magic."
And that description works with or without the capital M.
"They both have the ability to control the ball and to control the pace of the game," Blackman said. "Not only does [Nash] score, but he makes his teammates better through the pass.
"He can shoot it, penetrate and pass the basketball, and not just ball-moving passes, but penetrating passes that lead to scores."
So how do you defense a player like that?
"You have to have more maximum effort and effort at containment and incorporate others as part of your defensive scheme," Blackman said. "It's not easy. He's a two-time MVP.
"All the things that you write on the board about how to stop him have been written over the last two years...and he's still a two-time MVP. So what's been said, what's been written on the board and what's actually worked? You notice, there's a gap there."
Yeah, we've noticed.
To win this series, the Mavs have to figure out a way to deal with Nash. Give him an inch, and he'll slit their throats without batting a single one of those long, innocent eyelashes.
It's an old axiom: It takes a killer to stop a killer.
Are the Mavs killers enough to do the job?
