The Mavericks’ chip

Dallas' Dirk Nowitzki hits another one over the Laker's Pau Gasol

The Dallas Mavericks can’t get any respect and that is perfectly fine with me.

I have refrained from talking about the Mavericks’ playoff run before now because I was afraid I would jinx them. With the marvelous exception of the last NFL season (when I predicted Green Bay over Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl before the start of the season), if I pick a team or an individual to win a sporting event, it is the kiss of death. Counting that last season’s NFL prediction I think my total is something like one correct and 387,423 wrong. So even though I felt the Mavericks would sweep the Lakers after winning the first two games in Los Angeles, I didn’t want to say so publicly. And even if I did want to, my son — the hardest of hard-core MFFLs — would have cut my tongue out before I could have finished uttering the words. He really believes in jinxes.

The Mavericks have now won six playoff games in a row.Their last lost was that miserable game in Portland when they blew a 23-point third quarter lead. The Mavericks claim, and I believe the claim, that the Portland loss did not galvanize the team. But I do believe that the lack of respect paid to the Mavericks after that loss put a chip on their collective shoulders and since then they have been defying teams to knock it off.

After that loss, all I read, saw or heard in the national media was “Here we go again, another Mavericks el foldo, just as we witnessed in the NBA finals against the Heat.”

Entering the Lakers series, all the so-called experts said the Mavs would provide little resistance on the defending champions’ trek to another three-peat. Even after the teams left L.A. with Dallas up 2 games to nil, the Lakers were still predicted to come back. (“Remember,” said one of them Friday morning on ESPN’s First Take, ”the Mavericks were up 2-0 against Miami and lost that series.” Not one of the commentators on ESPN picked Dallas to win two games before the Lakers won four. Then Friday night, after the Mavs took a 3-0 series lead, folks were saying that L.A. would be the only team of 99 to ever come back from that big of a deficit.

Now comes the coverage from the national folks after the Sunday’s marvelous clincher. And was it about how Dallas Genghis Khanned the Lakers? No, it was about how this was Phil Jackson’s last game as a head coach and whether this series would damage his legacy (the consensus was it would not).

But that’s OK. That type of talk should keep that chip sitting securely on the Mavericks shoulder and I’m really liking the way they play when they realize they are not getting the respect they’ve earned and deserve. So bring on Oklahoma City or Memphis. I know before that series starts all the talk will be about the changing of the guard in the NBA and the emergence of new, younger teams with new, younger superstars. Let ‘em talk. The Mavs will simply play as if they’ve got something to prove. And you know what? They do.