NBA Preview: Southwest Division
by Tom Spurgeon
Dallas Mavericks
In terms of roster “building,” the Mavericks are trying to put together a showpiece house by stacking the same three rooms on top of each other over and over and over again. A quick look at their roster indicates they have plenty of marginally talented centers (including all-time object of derision Shawn Bradley), poor man’s Michael Jordans (really, really poor in some cases) and offensive-minded forwards with a dubious commitment to rebounding. Coach Don Nelson’s latest stint as an NBA coach has certainly built the reputation of the early 1980s Milwaukee Bucks teams, about whom one has suspicions that with Hubie Brown as coach we might just have a videogame called “Pressey vs. Magic.” Dirk Nowitzki remains wonderful to watch when he’s on, and when he has hair.
Houston Rockets
Center and Chinese folk hero Yao Ming added a new skill this offseason that terrifies his rival. That skill is speaking English, which Ming does well enough at this point he can appear translator-free on television with Regis and Kelly, although admittedly neither one of them is a master of a language. Ming’s game is supposedly aided by the addition of Tracy McGrady. I have no idea how Tracy McGrady will fit in with the Houston team, because I’ve never seen the talented guard and seven-year veteran actually play basketball before. He is joined by two generations of under-performing Michigan power forward, Juwan Howard and Maurice Taylor, and the 103-year-old free agent signee Mark Jackson. The key to the whole Houston season may be whether Van Gundy feels he needs to keep Jackson or if he cuts him for someone younger, such as anybody else in the entire league.
Memphis Grizzlies
I want to see the Grizzlies get really good so every year when they get deep into the playoffs we can see a feature on their ABA past. The good sign is that Jerry West has assembled the kind of roster heavy with B to B+ talent that makes a super-trade possible at some point in the near future. The bad sign is that there are really no players like that worth trading for these days. Hubie Brown becomes a much less effective coach when players grow accustomed to his fearsome, Cryptkeeper-like visage, but for now they’ll play hard for him and the team should do only slightly worse than last year.
New Orleans Hornets
If Baron Davis were a movie star, all of his movies would open up in April or in early October. He just doesn’t seem big-time, leading-man material. He is supported, strangely, but four almost similarly sized players, all of whom were drafted the same year: George Lynch, P.J. Brown, Rodney Rogers and Jamal Mashburn. Otherwise, this is a team so dull that the jumbotron at New Orleans Arena shows highlights from other games, despite trading for the player most likely to lead the leagues in taped segments with Ahmad Rashad, white dunkmaster Chris Andersen, who gives off the air of “failed child star” better than anyone in the league not named Christian Laettner.
San Antonio Spurs
I have a friend who is obsessed to the point of madness with seeing the Spurs great player, center-forward Tim Duncan, participate in a swimming contest. Duncan gave up swimming for an NBA career, but has kept that overwhelming swimmer’s charisma. He’d be a good corporate employee because when he screws up you can’t really tell how he’s playing any differently (lap after lap after lap), so it’s hard to pin him down as a player with flaws. He’s really the new Oscar Robertson, who in the 1960s and 1970s played better than anyone in the flow of the game, but only ever seemed to be working three quarters as hard. It remains to be seen if, like Robertson, Duncan can win a championship without a quality center to play off of. The team added the Rick Barry spawn who always does so well in statistical analyses of the game, so they should do just fine in a rapidly fading conference.