This is not "Insider" stuff. I highlighted a key point in red.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/trainingcamp07/columns/story?columnist=stein_marc&page=Mavs-071018
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/trainingcamp07/columns/story?columnist=stein_marc&page=Mavs-071018
No roster shake-up, but Mavs are tweaking approach
You must be registered for see images attachBy Marc Stein
ESPN.com
(Archive)
Let's make the safe assumption here. Let's operate under the conservative premise suggesting that the Dallas Mavericks, despite Kobe Bryant's increasing desire to join them, are not going to be able to make the ultimate change and swing a trade for the game's most fearsome individual talent.
So what happens if they can't come close to getting Kobe?
You must be registered for see images attachTim Heitman/Getty Images
Avery Johnson is tweaking his hands-on approach to coaching.
Avery Johnson would forcefully contend, in that unmistakable voice, that the Mavs have changed as much as they need to change after a 67-win season. He believes it no matter what the skeptics have been saying since the first-round playoff ouster that might have inflicted a deeper psychological scar than Dallas' unraveling in the NBA Finals one year earlier.
Changes? The roster alterations were cosmetic to put it charitably -- the list of prominent newcomers stops at Eddie Jones, Trenton Hassell and Brandon Bass -- but Johnson says he's going to try to coach this team a little differently.
He's convinced, furthermore, that a slightly new approach will be enough of a tweak if the Mavericks mature and toughen up like he's predicting.
No matter what the skeptics say.
"We've had a lot of successes around here," Johnson said of his two-plus seasons in charge. "We've had more successes around here than failures.
"I took a hard look at me [after the season], a hard look at the staff, looked at the personnel, looked at how we did business. The overall thing I saw was [that] we've got a pretty good program. We're not going to let some failures of the past stop us from looking at the future goal of still trying to win the championship."
The most acute sense of failure in Mavsland, of course, was felt by Dirk Nowitzki. The Mavs' cornerstone is bound to be subjected to untold levels of scrutiny this season after his utterly punchless performance against Golden State, which forced Nowitzki to collect his first MVP trophy as a playoff spectator, having been ousted in Round 1.
Yet Johnson is right there with his star. He, too, was metaphorically undressed by former Mavs coach Don Nelson in that series, starting with the ill-fated decision to change the league's most successful lineup and bench center Erick Dampier before Game 1. Johnson, too, faces an annoyingly long six-month slog before he really gets the chance to prove anything to anybody, given that Dallas will be judged solely on what it does in the postseason after dropping eight of its last 10 playoff games … three of them losses of the most excruciating sort to Miami in the 2006 Finals and three of them absolute hammerings.
That said …
Johnson, like the MVP, has been too good over the last couple of seasons to be dissed too loudly. The Mavericks, remember, have won 127 games in his two full seasons. They're 143-39 overall under Johnson, for a ridiculous winning percentage of .786. And that trip to the Finals that ended so painfully? It's the only trip to the Finals in franchise history.
So let's see. Let's see whether Johnson's faith in his players -- when large segments of the Dallas fan base were praying for a much bigger roster shakeup after the Golden State crash -- is repaid. Let's see how lasting and influential Johnson's promised changes will be.
You'll recall that the changes were major when he succeeded Nelson in March 2005. Johnson transformed the formerly free-wheeling Mavs into a team that made protecting the rim its No. 1 priority. He stressed disciplined shot selection and made the concept of "hard fouls" an everyday part of Dallas' vocabulary. He made the Mavs as Spurs-like as he possibly could.
Now?
Johnson says he's looking more inward, after six games with the Warriors that exposed all the frailties of the New Mavs.
- They don't pass the ball well. They rely almost exclusively on isolation plays to compensate for the lack of a playmaker who can create easier shot opportunities for the likes of Nowitzki.
- They aren't nearly as deep off the bench or as accurate from the perimeter as their reputation suggests, as evidenced by the Mavs' tendency to struggle against zone defenses even with shooters in the Nowitzki and Jason Terry class.
- They also often end up playing four-on-five offensively because their centers are non-scorers …
- and we won't even delve into the defensive side beyond mentioning the major troubles they had guarding the perimeter against the Warriors.
You must be registered for see images attachNed Dishman/Getty Images
Much of the Mavs' success will ride on Devin Harris' maturation.
"
We were just too predictable [offensively] last year," said one club insider.
So how can Johnson respond with only a minimal shuffling of the personnel? You'd have to say so far that he's been pretty aggressive in the search for solutions, after the Mavs decided that they were better off keeping the roster mostly intact if the only way to address some of the above issues would have meant parting with Josh Howard or Devin Harris.
He hired Paul Westphal as an assistant coach to pump some creativity into the offense and serve as a mellower counterpart to Johnson's in-your-face, Lil' General approach. He vowed not to call any plays for the first five preseason games in hopes that Harris, having recently received a contract extension, will start to trust his instincts more and run the team with some confidence as opposed to constantly glancing back at the bench during games for validation. Johnson is also letting his assistants (newcomer Mario Elie among them) do more in practice, as part of an attempt to resist his natural tendency to "hold their hands all the time."
And when he goes public with the occasional prickly statement about hoping to see better leadership from Nowitzki, Johnson is apt to follow up with an admission like: "Dirk has to tolerate me, too, which is a big task."
If Johnson has a serious complaint these days, it's that "sometimes I believe it more than them" when it comes to the Mavs' ability to win the first championship in team history, even after they seemingly broke through in 2006 by winning a Game 7 on their main rival's floor in San Antonio. Yet Johnson insists that he's still backing this group to use the recent playoff horrors to develop more mental toughness, largely because four of Dallas' top five scorers still are under 30.
Johnson, meanwhile, hopes to evolve like his mentor, Gregg Popovich, has in South Texas, where the Spurs have a knack for revving up in the second half of the season and then peaking in the playoffs even though they've also got an in-your-face coach.
"I'm not backing off," Johnson said. "But what about me trusting my players more? Let's give them a little credit and give them an opportunity to mature more. If they mature, I can still be myself. But give them room to grow.
"One of the first things Paul said when he came was, 'If you stand up through the whole practice and scream and hold their hands, and then you're screaming the whole game, you're going to be wiped out and they won't grow.' Maybe sometimes I want to get a little bit intense and he kind of reels me back in. That's not all bad, either."
Said veteran swingman Jerry Stackhouse: "To win 67 games, we can't just abandon everything we've done. We're not going to throw away everything we've built. We're not going to bury the MVP trophy and the best record last year and the trip to the Finals.
You must be registered for see images attachTim Heitman/Getty Images
Can Dirk follow up his MVP season with a championship ring?
"We're [also] not ever going to be a team to say, 'All right, we've won 10 in a row, let's lose this one tonight.' That's ridiculous. But are we maybe going to be a little smarter and rest guys and think about the long haul and put the onus on some of our younger players to be able to go in some games that they maybe wouldn't even have played in the regular season last year? I think that'll happen this year."
Something else that could happen: Johnson is giving serious consideration to regularly starting Stackhouse over Terry in hopes that Terry will give some new life to the bench bunch.
The Kobe Fantasy will remain a possibility as well, as long as rumblings about Bryant's hoping that he gets traded to Dallas continue to circulate on the front-office grapevine.
Yet you needn't expect any apologies from the Mavericks' brain trust if they end up going start to finish for one more season as presently constituted. Johnson already thinks that the Mavs "spent too much time last season apologizing for not winning the championship" in 2006, robbing themselves of the confidence you'd normally associate with a 67-win team.
The Mavs also haven't forgotten what happened the last time they blew up the roster, trading for Antawn Jamison and Antoine Walker after going to the Western Conference finals in 2003 and suffering through the most unsuccessful season of the Mark Cuban era.
"I don't want to think that everything we're doing in Dallas is wrong because we lost to one hot team," Nowitzki said in September. "I still believe we have some great pieces, with a great coach and a great owner and a great organization that will hopefully win it all one day.
"… You [media] guys are the experts. You guys all talk, but nobody really knows if we can [bounce back] or we can't. We're just going to have to go out and get over it. None of us are saying, 'No, we can't.' I think The General is going to get everybody ready."
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