Tuesday, May 01, 2007

MVPs Don't Talk Like That.

Down 3-1 against the Warriors, and with their backs against the wall heading into tonight's contest, Avery Johnson will not be hearing any sort of crap from his star player or anyone else about being frustrated:

"I'm tired of hearing about how they've taken him out of his game and any lack of confidence. You're just not supposed to have that, all right," said Johnson, perhaps the team's most intense player even though he's no longer playing.

"I wasn't the best of players and didn't have the best of skills, but you were not going to shake my confidence. We need all of our players to be confident, to be resilient, to be persistent and that's what I want to see tomorrow. If I don't see it at shootaround, I'm going to be highly upset ... because I need to have it going into that game tomorrow night. We've got to be confident and really sure about what we're doing."
I gotta say this for Avery: he sounds like he never took that uniform off his back when he retired. As for Dirk, reading the quotes in that piece, it reads as if Dwyane Wade was completely, 100% correct when he called him out earlier this season as not having the drive and focus to dominate the game at his leisure.
"They really go smaller and really sit down on my legs, don't let me put the ball down on the floor the way I want to and get to my spots," Nowitzki said.
Well then, don't you MAKE them play your game? Charles Barkley has absolutely assaulted Dirk for not going in the post and making the small Warriors lineup take him there, and I get it. If you are seven feet in height, no matter what your skill with a jumper, you'd better have a solid post game and the will to dominate. Nowitzki sounds resigned to not having it, and that's fatal to a team. MVPs don't talk like that. Champions don't talk like that.

4 comments:

Gangsta D said...

Hence, Dirk is not an MVP, no matter what the voters say.

Larry Brown said...

Maybe it's Avery's last attempt to spur the Mavs to victory, maybe his mind game to pump up Dirk. They may be down 3-1, but I still think it's far from over.

Signal to Noise said...

D - he plays like he did tonight, he may actually earn it.

LB - we'll see when the series goes back to Oakland.

james said...

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