There aren’t many choke job opportunities in your every day life.
Think about it. You can say someone choked on that stage, but they never go through 80% of speech or performance and then just when the crowd is preparing to give them a standing ovation trip on a banana peel or make a racist joke. Just doesn’t happen. You don’t choke in meetings, you bomb. You don’t choke when fixing your car, remodeling your kitchen, or raising your kids.
So for something that doesn’t happen in the majority of human existence, the Mavericks have an unconscionable amount of experience with doing so. The question now is if undergoing yet another catastrophic collapse is going to affect them the way it has before... except, you know, those weren’t the same teams.
The 2006 team that lost the Finals after being up? Yeah, here’s that roster. There are two players left from that team. Oh, but how about that 2007 team that lost to the freaking Warriors in the first round? Yup, same two players. Now, you can be a troglodyte and suppose that Dirk Nowitzki, one of the best clutch performers in the game, and Jason Terry, whose fourth quarters are legendary, are the problem, since they make up those two players, or, you can assume that the first was a monumental performance from one of the greatest players of his time in drawing fouls and making a difference, the second was a matter of matchups which can derail big-picture logic in a series faster than anything else, and this?
This was just Brandon Roy putting on a show. What are you going to do, really?
But that is the question now. What are the Mavs going to do? Are they going to come apart as the pundits are hoping, praying, wishing they will so they can pile on? Or will they do what teams as good as they are do, which is buckle down, get over it, come out in Game 5 at home and crush the hopes of the upstart in a rain of superior execution and experience? This is an entirely different Mavericks team than the one that fell apart against the Warriors. Shawn Marion, Jason Kidd, Tyson Chandler, Peja Stojakovic, Terry, Nowitzki, they all have experience in these types of situations and know how to respond.
Even more dubious? The odds of Brandon Roy doing what he did again. Forget Roy’s injury issues. Let’s assume the Brandon Roy of old is back, just for fun. Roy was launching shots that could have been, should have been, and would have been better contested. The Rose Garden got to the Mavericks, there’s no doubt. But a team that’s been as good defensively as the Mavericks have will respond. The Mavs certainly could use Caron Butler in this spot, but even without him, there are systemic adjustments they can make to respond.
It was a tough loss, but the Mavericks were a few missed plays away from going up 3-1 in this series. It’s a best-of-three again. But really, if the Mavericks thought this was going to be easy, they were fooling themselves. On the other hand, it works both ways. If the Blazers expect this Mavericks team to lay down and die, they’re probably confused in their own right.