DALLAS — Celebrating in their champagne-soaked championship T-shirts, it was easy to look around the Dallas Mavericks’ locker room and laugh off the reputations each of them once carried.
The point guard who was too old. His backup who was too small.
The brash owner with the big mouth. The agile center with the brittle body.
The coach and the star who weren’t strong enough leaders.
Now, they share a new label: NBA champions.
For one year at least, the Mavs showed that superteams can’t be built by a few stars hooking up. With a roster featuring Dirk Nowitzki and no other prime-of-his-career headliner, the Mavericks won the old-fashioned way, with an emphasis on things like camaraderie and unselfishness.
“I just think this is a win of team basketball,” said Nowitzki, the finals MVP. “This is a win for playing as a team on both ends of the floor, of sharing the ball, of passing the ball, and we’ve been doing that all season long. … We’re world champions. It sounds unbelievable.”
Team owner Mark Cuban joked that when Nowitzki re-signed for less money last summer, it meant part of it could be spent on the posse he was recruiting: Ian Mahinmi and Brian Cardinal.
Truth is, Nowitzki returned because Cuban said he was committed to winning with this core group of guys and that he would surround them with the best supporting cast he could find.
“You have to have players that believe in each other and trust each other and trust your coach,” Cuban said. “And that’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. There’s no quick solutions. There’s not a single template for winning the championship. If there was, everybody would do it.”
Perhaps the most remarkable part is that they pulled it off without two guys expected to be starters: Caron Butler, who was their second-leading scorer until a gruesome knee injury on New Year’s Day, and Rodrigue Beaubois, a second-year guard whose speed and athleticism were supposed to charge up the offense. But Beaubois was hurt until February, then ineffective, then hurt again.
That left Rick Carlisle constantly mixing and matching.
In the finals, he gambled by putting a struggling J.J. Barea into the starting lineup and they won three straight games. The guy he asked to come off the bench, DeShawn Stevenson, thrived in his new role.
Backup center Brendan Haywood hurt his hip and was limited, so Mahinmi filled in pretty well, hitting two memorable shots in the clincher. Backup forward Peja Stojakovic played his way out of the rotation, and Cardinal seized his extra minutes with gritty defense and taking open shots when he had them.
“This is the most special team that I’ve ever been around,” said Carlisle, who 25 years earlier was part of a very special team, the ’86 champion Boston Celtics. “When you view it from afar, it doesn’t look like a physically bruising-type team. So a lot of people don’t think we have the grit and the guts and the mental toughness…. You can’t dismiss how everybody stayed ready and how everybody answered the bell.”
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