Posted on
5/16/2008 3:24:14 PM
NBA Basketball Betting Opinion – Is Carlisle the Cure?
By Tim Furious
Mark Cuban has officially gone off the deep end. I said it when he pulled the trigger on the Kidd trade. I’m saying it again. My hatred of that trade is well documented, and with the Mavericks getting bounced in the first round of the playoffs (again), I can now rest my case that that trade was an unmitigated disaster.
Now they’re stuck with Jason Kidd at a ridiculous price, and barely have any youth to build on for the future. Yet Cuban, whose growing distraction with the Chicago Cubs is beginning to impair his judgment concerning his NBA operations, pointed at the finger at the man at the helm instead of himself.
Inexplicably firing Avery Johnson was one of the most ridiculous firings I’ve seen this year (the other one is the release of Mike D’Antoni). Avery was beloved in Dallas, both by players and the fans. There’s nobody in the league who would say a bad thing about the little coach that could – and did. Still, there was no coach in the league that was going to take this Kidd-led squad past the first round. So why is Avery getting the boot?
We’re here talking about Johnson, a coach who won 66 of his first 82 games, which is a league record. He was the quickest to reach the 50-win mark, a feat he accomplished in no less than 62 games. In his first full season as the coach in Dallas, he was asked to lead the Western All-Stars in 2006. That very same season, he led Dallas unexpectedly to the NBA Finals, where they where defeated by the Miami Heat.
What did Avery do wrong here exactly? The 2006 Finals weren’t his fault. That finger needs to be pointed at Dirk Nowitski whose “leadership” was the real problem. The loss to the Golden State Warriors in the first-round of the 2007 NBA Playoffs may have been his fault, but the Mavs were literally facing the one team that could give them fits. Not everyone is perfect.
In 2007-08, the Mavericks were doing just fine in the league as a top-5 team that was wheeling and dealing, trying to adjust to the New West. Phoenix got bigger. New Orleans emerged as a force of nature. The Spurs stayed the same. LA became absolutely ridiculous. Dallas? Well, they panicked.
Or, rather, Mark Cuban panicked. I’ve already documented my opinion of this trade. Obviously, I didn’t like it. Even more obvious is the evidence that the trade didn’t work. The only way you justify brining in an over-the-hill point guard who can’t defend anybody is by hoisting the NBA Championship at the end of the year. That didn’t happen, so the trade was a bust. No argument can be made to defend it.
Yet, when Dallas packed its bags this year, there was no way I saw Cuban firing Johnson. It wasn’t Avery’s fault that Kidd was brought on this team. While everyone was getting bigger and better, Dallas was getting smaller, older and slower. And none of that was Johnson’s doing. He doesn’t make decisions on trades. Usually the NBA norm is to fire the coach first before anyone else. Cuban is anything but normal.
Turns out, he isn’t.
Like every other sordid NBA franchise, Cuban let a great NBA coach walk away and pointed the finger at Johnson when he should’ve been blaming himself. With no looking back after letting Harris, the legitimate future of the Mavs, go in return for maybe two years of Jason Kidd, Cuban just kept trying to cover up mistakes of the past by making mistakes in the present.
Enter Rick Carlisle, the new coach of the Dallas Mavericks. Carlisle is a very good coach, having led once-miserable rosters in Indiana to the NBA Finals in 2000. Carlisle turned Mark Jackson in to a stud. Can he do the same with Kidd? Not at this age, and not in the life time.
Again, this isn’t Carlisle’s fault exactly. He’s inheriting a team that has tremendous deficiencies at key points on the floor. Carlisle isn’t the cure to the Mavericks woes. Getting Mark Cuban to stop taking crazy pills is the cure.
Greed is a crazy thing, and so is ego. For Cuban, he’s starting to spread his empire too thin. By covering up mistakes by making more mistakes, Cuban is beginning to show glimpses of the flaws that have brought down the best empires in history.
Just don’t be caught with your betting dollars in the banks of the Dallas Mavericks when the walls come down.
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