Warriors come out to play, Mavs go home

At the beginning of the series between the Dallas Mavericks and the Golden State Warriors, a radio promo played with an audio of this clip from the old movie, The Warriors. It turns out that they did indeed come out to play. The Mavs, the team with the top record during the regular season and the #1 seed in the whole freakin' playoffs who would have had home court advantage the entire way, ended their run last night - so their home court advantage lasted one series.

Besides failing to go by the logic of taking it to the rim and getting either the basket, the foul, or both, the Mavs instead lived - and died - from the perimeter. They also failed to take advantage of an injured Baron Davis, who had been running circles around the Mavs the previous games, and they failed to exploit the one strategem that worked in their two victories: They failed to get the Warriors TOO emotional. When the Warriors get too emotional, they get sloppy, they get fouls, and they get ejections. In this game in which the emotional intensity was fever pitch, the Mavs had all the emotional intensity of Mr. Spock.

I didn't think anything would be worse than the Mavs losing in the championship last year after being up 2-0. I was wrong. This is going to sit in their craw for a long time.