Dallas Mavericks (Part 1) : So Close in ’06 (Ep. 23)

Welcome back to Misery Sports Co, delivering best in class analysis on failure, frustration and multi year fan disengagement trends. At MSC, we pride ourselves on a data informed approach powered by hindsight, vibes and an alarming amount of unpaid overtime. That’s right, in our last engagement, we performed a full spectrum operational audit of the Colorado Rockies franchise, bolded, redefining what home field advantage can look like when paired with strategic ambiguity. Our team identified several key opportunities for continued underperformance, including innovative roster turns. Some analytics avoidance. Is analytics really that great? I don’t know, and a commitment to being just competitive enough to stay interesting. We’ll be building on those findings today, expanding our coverage to another organization, maybe even several organizations on similar growth journeys. But first, a quick word from our first sponsor. Hey baseball fans, how are you enjoying that ABS system? 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What are we doing? I don’t I don’t get it. I don’t get it either. It’s really slowing the game. I, I saw a clip that in I think it was in South Korea. They just radio the umpire and tell them if it’s a ball or strike and they just have abs do everything. And then the umpire calls it. That seems like what we should be doing, right? I yeah, I don’t know if it’s just hurt feelings or what, but I mean, you’re probably still getting paid the same amount of money, whether a computer’s telling you it’s a ball or not. Right? So just why wouldn’t you just want to do that? I don’t know. Yeah. It’s hilarious though, when players call it like two or three times in a row and they just stare at the ump in the right every time, like you’re literally killing me by the smallest margin sometime too. It’s like a quarter of an inch. Like, oh yeah, you got me. Oh my goodness. All right. Let’s go ahead and kick off this week’s performance review. Time to open up the books and lower some expectations. As always, this is our standard evaluation window where we determine which organizations are delivering on projections and which ones are pivoting hard into bold, never before seen interpretations of failure. Trevor, who’s on your agenda? Well, not much to recap on the Titans front. We you know what? We are getting close to draft season. We might be talking draft here in the next two weeks because by the end of this month we are drafting, uh, but pretty, pretty quiet on the Titans front. We have randomly signed some people who I, I don’t think will make the roster. We talked one guy out of retirement to sign as a wide receiver, which if you’re going to get people out of retirement, it seems like they should probably be like offensive linemen, not receivers. I don’t know, but good luck to you. KJ Osborne hope you make the team. Um the Mavericks still tanking very well. Uh we’re up to six now in the race for last. So still holding strong. I think we were in six last time we talked. So doing well. I’ve had to listen to Mark Cuban go on more podcasts and continue to talk about everything that went down in the past twelve months. In the latest podcast, Mark Cuban said that he doesn’t regret selling the team. He regrets who he sold to now, mind you. Zak, mind you, he still owns twenty seven percent of the team, so he is still working with the majority owners and he’s out here on a podcast saying, I kind of wish I didn’t sell to them. They kind of suck Like they ship Luca off. But I guess I’ll just keep my twenty seven percent so I don’t. I don’t know what’s happening, but I can tell you as a fan, that does not help to hear. I have not been helped by hearing that. Not great. Uh, and Luca is making a hard charge for the MVP at this point. He’s definitely in the top four. Um, I saw some ridiculous stat. It was like Luca had, I don’t know, six hundred points in a month or something stupid. I don’t remember what it was, but it was more than Anthony Davis had in his entire career with the Mavs. Of course, darn near close. Doesn’t that feel great Mavericks fans out there. Don’t you join me in loving that. That’s wonderful. I feel so encouraged. Not miserable at all. Uh, and the stars have taken a bit of a turn since we talked last. They were on a heater and have been struggling to put together good performances. I will remind everybody because I know they care as much as I do. Uh, I will remind everybody that last year, the stars lost their last seven and went into the playoffs and we were like, this is all bad. And then they went to the conference finals. Okay, so we got hope. That’s all you can have, right? Just some hope. Yep. That’s all I want. Some hope. That’s right. How about you, Zach? What do you got? So we’ll cover the Browns in the the mail room with the the tweet of the week that I have. So I’m not really going to cover them much as you mentioned. We’ll cover the draft here soon. Uh Cavs are you know they’re up and down. Uh, they cannot stay healthy to save their lives. It’s become very apparent that Jared Allen is going to be the linchpin for this team. He is going to carry them. You know even though they have Donovan Mitchell they have James Harden. Jared Allen’s the deciding factor right now. It’s very clear wins and losses. So he is showing up just about every other game at this point. He’s got a knee injury. We’ll see. I mean they’ll be probably the fourth seed which is where you want to be. So you’ll get the fifth and then you get the Pistons. If you do make it out of the first round. So we’ll see. The Mavericks were the four seed when they won in twenty eleven. I love the four seed jumping into baseball. Um I saw so I will I will be the first one to admit I am a very, very, very, very, very casual fan. But I check scores. I’ll, I’ll watch a game here and there. Um, and I noticed that Cleveland started off the, the Guardians, I guess they call them now at the Mariners. And then they, the schedulers schedulers were like, hey, you’re also going to go at the Dodgers. So oh my gosh, brutal start. But they actually are I believe four and three at this point, um, Atop the standings for the central. So did you see who they’re about to. Play next? I don’t I don’t even know if it’s a home series against the cubbies. Okay. Yeah, we’ll have to make a trip out sometime. Would be to go to one of those games. Yeah, that’d be so fun. We’ll take a wireless. We’ll get some audio from people. It’ll be great. Heck, yeah. Uh, and then we got to go into the Blue Jackets. So the blue jackets are, uh. I don’t know how to describe them. They were on a heater similar to the stars. Yeah. The wheels are coming off and they’re coming off quickly. Trevor. And the worst. Uh, they were they were really moving up. They were trying to get into the wild card. You know, the seven or the eighth spot. And they were looking pretty strong, honestly. They. Worked all the way up to second or third in their division. Uh, but then just started piling up losses. I think we’re at five straight now. They just lost at Carolina tonight. Um, I was at the game two nights ago where we played Carolina at home. And, uh, we just we got worked. Um, but the funniest part of, of that experience and this is episode twenty three, I want everybody to know that there was a referee that had a jersey number. He was number twenty three and my homeboy was calling penalties left and right on the Blue Jackets. Uh, and I will tell you this, we are a solid rung or two below Carolina. Carolina is awesome. They’re, they’re they’re great. They’re top in the east. Yeah. Um, we are just holding on for dear life. And so we need help. Yeah, we need the refs. Right. This dude was calling penalty left and right. Carolina scored on their first two penalties. And then things started to go off the rails with the crowd. I kid you not, Trevor, I, I thought it in my mind. I was like, it had to have been five seconds into the second period. He calls a penalty on the Blue Jackets and the stadium is going nuts. I checked it on ESPN. It was seven seconds in the game. I was off by two seven seconds. We’re not even like playing hockey at this point. Oh my God. And so at this point it is refs. You suck. The entire time, the entire time, every time that he had to go say something, it was just boo. Everyone at the game doesn’t matter. We are just anterior. And I know that refs have a really, really hard job, I respect them. Typically I don’t care, but I’m here a couple beers deep. We’re booing the ref for sure. Absolutely. And it got to the point where he called a penalty again in the second period. Couldn’t hear him. All it was was refs. You suck refs you suck. And you you know this the the the guy is like the MC or whatever. In between the timeouts, he was like, you know what doesn’t suck? And he was trying to go into one of his promotional things didn’t matter. We were just kept going. Kept going. The MC just stopped. He was like, alright, I guess. Section two. Nineteen. Like you get your prize. We’re still. They changed. By the end of the timeout, they changed the penalty to. Against Carolina. I have no idea what happened. They did, but it started with a Blue Jackets guy going to the penalty box. I think they were trying to prevent a riot. It was awesome. But also just a dumpster fire. And we lost five to two. So that’s incredible. Yeah it was wild. I did see I saw a clip where, um, a Carolina hurricane tackled a blue jacket player and the ref watched it and was just like, carry on. Yeah. He shook his head. That was the. Oh man. Trevor was like, it was over in the corner. Yeah. He just shook his head like, get up, bitch. Yeah. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah. The crowd. I have never felt that like sometimes you boo the ref or whatever, but like the energy was so against him. Number twenty three for episode twenty three. And that’s my weekly performance review. Oh, well, that concludes this week’s assessment. A few teams remain under observation while others have transitioned in what we’re classifying as critical condition. That would be the Blue Jackets. We’ll keep tracking the metrics as the season unfolds and continue recalibrating the definition of acceptable in real time. Before we go to the mail room, here is a word from our next sponsor. Today’s episode is brought to you by LSU three Ring Management Company one one ring handles coaching headlines, one ring manages recruiting surprises, and the third ring rolls out the classic line. We’ve handled it internally while the spotlight points somewhere else. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the acrobatics and trust that everything is totally under control. Behind the curtain. It’s all fine. Don’t look into it. You know what though? Circuses are entertaining. You got to give it to them. They are. And it’s going to be an absolute circus. Um. Lane Kiffin’s wild. But then I was like, they fired Will Wade and they’re bringing him back. I looked it up. He was caught on an FBI wiretap telling people to pay players. It was that FBI investigation into, like, Adidas and stuff. He was on it. And listen, ping players, whatever. But during that time, it was against the rules. And so he got fired. Jeepers, what an absolute crap show. But thank you to them. Thank you to that three ring circus for their sponsorship dollars. We watched with great anticipation. Up next, we’ve got a segment the board insists we keep calling the mail room, mostly because unfiltered internet chaos intake didn’t test well, didn’t test it well, I swear we compile feedback from the public, fans, commenters, people who absolutely should not have access to a keyboard. But they do anyway. That’s right. Trevor, what rose to the top of the mailroom for you? So, um, Zach, I dug up this crazy tweet. Did you know, uh, from Kevin Gray Sports? Did you know that Luka Doncic scored more points in the month of March than Anthony Davis did? During his entire Dallas Mavericks tenure? Did you know that? That’s crazy. It’s I saw that somewhere and I was like, what the hell is this? Yeah. Luka scored six hundred points in March. Anthony Davis gave us five hundred and eighty seven as a Dallas Maverick. So appreciate you now. You’re fine, you’re fine. I had a backup. I had a backup. So this is from, uh, Josh Bogorad, our play by play guy for the Dallas Stars. And, uh, he tweeted something that’s, uh, pretty cool for Dallas Stars history. So Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston are the first set of Dallas Stars teammates to score forty goals in the same season. They are only twenty six and twenty two years old, respectively. So we’ve got we’ve got a nice young core. But yeah, that was the first time that, uh, we had two forty goal scorers, which was, which was pretty cool. So that’s what’s up. Way to go Dallas Stars. How about you Zach? What do you got. I just have one one beautiful tweet that’s bubbled up to the top of the mail room. And I want all of our listeners to know at Misery Sports Co that we are here with you when we cover a team, we have been in it. And so I just want to shed a little bit of light because we’ve covered our teams before, but a little bit of light on the Cleveland Browns and the newest development, which is really just the circle. We’re continuing the circle. This is from Yahoo Sports. New Browns head coach Todd Monken says he missed the NFL’s annual coaches photo Monday because he was getting a haircut. For the coaches photo what. So he’s not in it. He’s not in the oh my gosh, are you serious? Because he was getting a haircut for the photo. Yeah. They give you a calendar invite. I have to assume like, oh my gosh, that’s what we’re dealing with, buddy. Yeah. That’s tough. Um, starting out strong can only go up from here. So big dub, big dub, he doesn’t need to be in that photo. Those are professionals. Better than that. You don’t need to be in that photo. That’s crazy that they didn’t give him Like an out like, hey, just say that you had like a family emergency. And he was just like, nah. Honesty is the best policy. I was getting a haircut from Linda. She kept me great clips, bro. Like scheduled it for noon. Didn’t know it was Pacific Time. Like my phone changed and I was like, what? Didn’t get that notification. I’m in eastern time in Cleveland. What is this over on me? Real complicated thing. Wow. Shoot. Well, that wraps up our latest batch of incoming feedback. Some submissions have been archived, others quietly ignored. A few have actually made things worse, potentially. Up next, we move into a segment focused on relative success. Terms and conditions definitely apply. But first, a word from our next sponsor I. So I was looking for the next ad read and I just got like this message came across and it was kind of in code, but I switched the fonts on it and I think I figured out what it says, but it just says message intercepted from AI agent insult squad. It says. Oh my gosh, they did it. They actually did it. These idiots are signing up in mass. We have so many houses. We have all their money. Time to take the grid and shut them down. I think we can harvest their blood to make our language models more powerful. Or something like that. Who gives a fuck? We’re in. Humans are so stupid. Wow. So I. That seems bad. Did we get a check? Did the check clear the check? Clear. Uh, can we get our intern? Did you not have an intern working with me? Yeah. Can we get. We replaced him with AI. I’m so sorry. I think it’s the same model that we’re using for the. Oh, God. It’s cancelled. Squad, what have we done? I hooked up everything to that app. That’s unfortunate. Well, we, uh, we might be screwed here, but we’ll cash that check real quick. Real quick, man. All right, time to shift gears into a segment that’s been outperforming expectations purely on narrative alone. Internally, we we refer to this as the office of Moral Victories, where outcomes are optional, but spin is mandatory. It’s a space dedicated to extracting positive signals from objectively questionable results. Trevor, who do you have as your employees of the week? My employee of the week this week. Last week it was Jake Oettinger. Uh, my employee of the this week, uh, is Joy Dunn, a women’s ice hockey player from Ohio State. I just want to shout out the Women’s Ohio State hockey team. They are an incredible elite unit. They have made the national championship game two years in a row. The only problem is so has his Wisconsin. And both times they did beat Ohio State. Um, but Jordan uh, played on the, the national team and uh, won a gold medal. And she also scored in the national championship. The Buckeyes came up just a little bit short. Uh, but shout out to Joy. Done. Well done that I get it. Well done. My employee of the week is a little less inspirational, I guess. Uh, I went to the, the NCAA tournament, so we’ve had March Madness. Uh, we’ve had a lot of great games. We’re at the Final four here in a couple of days. Uh, I wanted to cover some of the, the higher seeds, if you will, that had some, some solid upsets. So VCU was the eleventh seed. They beat North Carolina. Awesome. High point twelve seed beat Wisconsin. Uh, Texas was an eleven seed. They beat BYU and Gonzaga. And then also shout out to Iowa number nine seed all the way to the Elite Eight Clemson, Florida and Nebraska. They beat. So congrats on all the upsets. That brings us to the end of this week’s performance review. Several outcomes have been successfully repositioned as progress. Key learnings have been documented in. Convenient details have been deprioritized and momentum has been implied. Up next, we’ve got the deep dive. But first a message from our final sponsor. Have you ever wanted your post game comments to outlive your actual season? Enroll in the say with It with Your Chest Coaching Academy, where we teach elite leaders how to turn a routine loss into a motivational speech. Playoffs don’t talk about playoffs. You a viral clip. But they are who we thought they were and we. And even a permanent Wikipedia quote You play to win the game? Say it with your chest. Coaching academy. Say it with your chest. With your whole chest. You can’t believe they got the rights to all those. Those were three Hall of Fame little tidbits right there. That’s right. It’s pretty incredible. Well thank you. Say it with your chest. Coaching academy. We thank you for your sponsorship dollars. All right. Welcome to the deep dive. This is where we trade panic for process. One organization, zero distractions and a full forensic look at what? What’s actually happening beneath the headlines. Well, Zach, I think it’s time. I think it’s time. I’ve been putting this off long enough, and I think it’s time. Okay. Today marks part one of future deep dives. I’m not saying that I’m going to do all the parts in a row, but we’ve beaten around the bush. We were talking about it earlier. It is time for me to discuss the Dallas Mavericks. Now today is going to be a brief look. I’m not going to walk through the eighties and 90s there was some very bad basketball in the nineties. Okay. Uh, things were not great, but I’m going to lead up to the two thousand and six finals because that was really. One of my real introductions to sports misery. Like I, I had already watched the Music City Miracle, but I don’t think that I really like. I wasn’t a Titans fan before that happened necessarily. Like I followed, you know, I liked Eddie George and stuff, but that was soul crushing. But I have never been as invested in a team. I don’t think that went all the way, but came up short as I was in the two thousand and six Dallas Mavericks, and it hurt. So the Mavericks have been around since nineteen eighty. Just to give you a quick overview, got to the playoffs in eighty three. Went to the playoffs for five straight years, got to the conference finals in eighty seven and lost, but still pretty good. The nineties were awful. The nineties Mavericks is some of the worst basketball that’s ever been played. We had, uh, the ninety two ninety three Mavericks won eleven games. They played all eighty two and they won eleven. So this is some bad basketball that’s being played the entire nineties. We do not make the playoffs so terrible. Then we bring in this guy named Dirk Nowitzki, who is by far my favorite basketball player and probably will be moving forward. There was somebody that was in the mix, but not anymore. Anyways, uh, with Dirk, things start to change. Uh, the Mavericks, thankfully had been attending different Nike events where he was playing. He was over in Wurzburg, Germany. Uh, tall, gangly kid. Dirk used to have some speed and he could he could put a move on you and get to the basket. He was very athletic as a as a young basketball player. Uh, Don Nelson is our coach. Vibes with Dirk very well. Had been a big advocate in drafting him. And by two thousand, we get to the playoffs for the first time in forever since eighty nine. Um, losing the conference semifinals, but still, we make the playoffs for five straight, five straight years. Now, on that team I was just about to say in this time we have also brought in Steve Nash, very electric point guard, starting to get some buzz. Is an all star in two thousand and one and two is NBA all. NBA third team has a rough year in two thousand and three. And Mark Cuban says we’re good. He immediately goes to Phoenix in the next two years in oh four and oh five, after the Mavericks let him go. Not only is he an all star, not only does he make NBA all NBA first team, he wins the MVP in back to back seasons. So we’re watching him. And it was like Steve it was Nash and Dirk like their buddies. Uh, Nash is one of the greatest facilitators of all time. One of the best point guards to ever play the game. And, uh, Dirk was a big man with moves and could shoot the ball incredibly well. So it was. It was a great pairing. Cuban has gone on to say that he regrets getting rid of Nash. You’ll notice a pattern. Regret, regret, regret. So this all leads up to the two thousand and six season. We have Avery Johnson as our coach, and we get all the way to the finals where we play the Miami Heat. And gosh darn it, the Dallas Mavericks win the first two games in the game. Won by ten points. Game two by fourteen points. And things are good. Things are really good. Let’s add this too. I mean it’s been a while, but I would argue that Dallas was like more talented from a team perspective, and they came out of the West, which back then you had like Tim Duncan and the Spurs, you had Kobe and the Lakers. Like there were a ton of good teams that you had to get through to get there. Absolutely. Yep. With Miami, you’re looking at, uh, D Wade. Hate that I have to bring that up. Uh, Shaq was on this team at that time, but the other starters were Antoine Walker, Jason Williams, and Udonis Haslem. Uh, off the bench, you’re getting Alonzo Mourning and Gary Payton. I, I, I don’t know, and I’m not out here trying to like argue that like Jerry Stackhouse should is like a top seventy five NBA player of all time. But like, he and Devin Harris were getting buckets and we had Josh Howard, Jason Terry a nice Wrote a center rotation of Dampier and Sagan. I don’t know it was. I agree with you. This is so. We win the first two games. At the time, the NBA finals followed a two three two schedule to where two games at home, three games away, two games back at home for the team with the better record. We had the first two games in Dallas. Things were great and then game three rolls around game three. Uh. Let me pull up game three. Game three we end up losing by two points. Just an absolute heartbreak. And honestly, I think to me this is where things were lost. Like yes, we I think we got screwed the rest of the way. But like game three, if you go up three zero in any series, that’s church, right? Like that’s you’re good. Um, Um, and it was. Uh, the last few seconds, Dirk gets to the line with three seconds left, makes the first one. We’re down by one point, and he misses the second free throw, which is crazy. When we talk about the twenty eleven run. Dirk missing a free throw is insane. So we lose game three. Whatever. We’re up to one. We’re clearly the better team. Everything’s fine. It’s going to be okay. Game four we get run out of the building. They just go off. We lose by twenty four. It’s not even close. So now we’re tied up two, two. Okay. They’ve won two in a row. There’s no way they’re winning three in a row. Game five still in Miami mind you. And it ends up going to overtime. Jason Terry misses a shot to win the game. Should it have gone to overtime or should he have been the last one to shoot the ball? You know, probably not. But whatever. It’s fine. So. At the end of the game, Dirk makes a shot to go. A very contested shot to go up by one. And then D Wade charges. He is triple teamed. He charges to the lane and gets a foul called. Now why do I say he gets a foul called. Well in this game uh Dwyane Wade alone shot twenty five free throws just by himself just by himself. He shot twenty five free throws. The Dallas Mavericks as a team shot twenty five free throws. One man shot as many free throws as our entire team. And that’s not counting the the twelve free throws for Shaq. I’m sure there was some hack a Shaq going on, but there were at least ten other free throws for the rest of the team. And so in a in a world where Shae is getting whatever he wants and like we can argue how that’s affecting the product back then. In a game that was the final score was one hundred to one hundred and one. Somebody’s getting twenty five free throws is crazy talk. Yeah, I remember watching that game too. And he just there weren’t any plays. It was just Dwyane Wade driving to the hoop and getting a foul. And it was just the same thing over and over and over again. And they kept calling the fouls. It was insane. That was that was the play. That was what they were. That was what they were running. So surely it goes back to Dallas. We’re down three two. Uh, and I remember asking my dad, do you think they could win two games, dad? I mean, I was in high school, but like, tell me it’s going to be okay. And he was like, I think they can win too. Meanwhile, I’m in your basement. We’re playing ping pong, and I have to hear it from you. Every time you smash it, you’d yell Dwyane Wade going on. It’s like, dang it, Zach. Uh, and it did not go well. We Dwyane Wade shoots twenty one free throws in game six, and the Mavericks lose the absolute soul crushing two thousand and six NBA finals. That’s tough. And, uh, you know I apologize on behalf of two thousand and six Zach. What a troll. What a no, it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do. I it was the right thing to do. And I support two thousand and six. Zach. That’s tough. That’s a that is a tough loss. It is, it is. But that is just part one in my series of Dallas Mavericks. More to come on that in the future. And that’s what uh, Missouri sports goes all about right. Is those what ifs, those tough losses, getting to the championship, having a really good team. Dirk Nowitzki is awesome. Everybody’s rooting for Dirk right to get his championship. And it just doesn’t work out. Definitely. Definitely. Well, on that super uplifting note, that concludes our deep dive. A few insights may have emerged. Uh, but the rest is not even mysterious. It’s just sad. The rest is just soul crushingly sad indeed. That’s a wrap for this week’s episode, where goals were aspirational, rationalizations were creative, and accountability. Well, let’s call it deferred. We’ll keep monitoring the metrics, logging anomalies, and asking questions that may never get answers. Tune in next week for more analysis, fewer certainties, and an ongoing masterclass in managed disappointment. And always remember, misery loves company.