Mavericks Rediscover Their Inner Child

Almost, a great Finals.

With a few more viewers and one fewer owner, the Heat-Mavericks could have been a classic like the Lakers-Celtics wars of 1984, 1985 and 1987. As it was, it was a terrific series ... that drew an 8.5 TV rating, third-lowest in prime time.

If this year’s Finals with that much drama, artistry and personality can’t get a 12, the problem isn’t just recent low-scoring or one-sided series. Either the NBA’s audience has really shrunk or there’s some other problem.

TV people think Moses came down the mountain with 11 commandments, the last of which was, “Thou shalt start no game before 6 p.m. in the West, no matter what day it is in the East when thou shalt finish.” If I were David Stern, I’d live dangerously and move a Sunday game up an hour to see what happens.

This was hard for Stern before booing Mavericks fans almost drowned him out during the trophy presentation while he praised owner Mark Cuban and his vibrant franchise.

Well, at least it was vibrant up until the last 6 minutes 34 seconds of Game 3.

Give me this again: The Mavericks, about to go up 3-0, blow a 13-point lead in one of the all-time gag jobs ... hack away at Shaquille O’Neal, whom everyone else now contains without extraordinary methods, spend the whole series in the penalty and let Dwyane Wade shoot 16 free throws a game ... need two wins at home when the Heat comes from 14 behind to dump them in Game 6 ... and their fans think they’ve been cheated?

Cuban, who has led a major city into the dark side, or at least the crying side, was gracious all the way through Game 5, or in other words, until the Mavericks trailed in the series, before his inner child resurfaced.

He yelled at referee Joe DeRosa, snarled curses at innocuous questions from the media and glared at Stern, although he denied telling Stern his league was rigged.

Of course, it’s not rigged. If it were, Cuban wouldn’t have gotten this close. However, in a fearless defense of the league on his blog, Cuban conceded that “probably 80%” of the 12,000 e-mails he’d received “questioned some level of honesty.”

(Cuban is legendary for not sleeping, but just reading the headers on 12,000 e-mails in 24 hours would be one every 7.2 seconds. Maybe this guy is really Dracula.)

By the way, according to Cuban’s vaunted won-loss records for referees from the 2001-2005 postseasons, which I updated to include this series, the Mavericks had won six of DeRosa’s seven games, their best record with any of the 29 officials listed.

As for cursing, Cuban insisted it’s not a big deal, writing that he can’t “think of anything funnier than a 3-year-old cursing.”

Cuban did note his wife doesn’t like the idea of getting “phone calls from teachers and other parents [and] getting blamed for all the 3-year-olds in the little gym class screaming [more bad words that can’t be reprinted here].”

“Me, I couldn’t think of anything I would rather see and hear,” Cuban wrote, “but that’s me.”

Exactly. For the total Mark Cuban Experience, it’s on BlogMaverick.com.

Larger-than-life characters create great story lines, but there was one little problem: Cuban wasn’t one of the basketball players in this series.

Nothing angers Stern more these days than going Off Message. This was so far Off, it didn’t look like they would be able to find their way back On.

Stern is as smooth as Cary Grant, presenting himself as a kindly paterfamilias who advises his wonderful owners. He’s actually the last of the great autocratic commissioners, has a Vesuvian temper and rules with an iron fist inside his velvet glove.

Stern has a valid complaint that his players are unfairly targeted and under duress says race plays a part. (A who’s who of the nation’s sports columnists covered last week’s U.S. Open, which pulled a TV rating half the size of the Finals.)

Since the 2004 Pistons-Pacers Auburn Hills riot, which shook his big-ticket sponsors, Stern has become even more defensive. Forgoing the usual lockout, he made a quick deal with the union and launched an insistent public-relations campaign, once even insisting, “Our players do more in the community than any other professional athlete in the world individually with their teams and with us.”

The last thing Stern needed was a wacko owner upstaging his marquee event with the dreaded conspiracy theory, but some things can’t be controlled and Cuban is high on the list.

The lunacy and artistry came together in the series’ pivotal play, Wade’s amazing assault on the basket at the end of Game 5 ... bracketed by Cuban’s protest that Wade committed a backcourt violation on the front end and the Mavericks’ consternation over the foul call on the back end.

In between, it was one of the great plays in NBA history -- and even I don’t think the refs should have called that touch foul on Dirk Nowitzki.

The Mavericks were in a zone or had everybody on Wade. Just over half-court, he encountered Jason Terry and Devin Harris, who were supposed to make him give the ball up, and jumped between them.

Wade went hard to his right up the sideline with Harris chasing him and Josh Howard jumping out, driving him toward the corner ... whereupon Wade crossed over on his dribble, cut back into the middle and left both behind ... then darted back to his right past Nowitzki, laid the ball up and got the call.

Stern waited a day after Cuban went off, realized he had no choice and fined him $250,000. Cuban, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with “Payback” hand-printed on the back, did his Stairmaster News Conference before Game 6, saying it was worth it to be within two wins of a title on the Mavericks’ court.

He wasn’t lying. Cuban might make everyone crazy, but if he isn’t having the time of his life, he’s too busy to notice it.

Stern, who was gracious enough to come by, was obliged to shake his sweaty hand -- again. As Cuban wrote before Game 1, “I just didn’t want to bust my routine. So it’s a sweaty handshake to the Commissioner. Which actually shows how cool he can be.”

Unfortunately, Dallas didn’t get either of those two wins.

Payback, indeed.

Faces and Figures

There goes a fat paragraph of stuff I could never make up every week: The Knicks finally made it official in the usual manner, firing Larry Brown -- in a news release. After stonewalling everyone for the six weeks of this fiasco, which included threats to arrest reporters for trespassing at the practice facility and everyone showing up to see corporate boss James Dolan’s blues band, team officials savaged Brown with anonymous quotes that didn’t fly. The New York Daily News called Dolan, the son of Cablevision head Charles Dolan, “son of Cablevison” and “Guitar Jimmy.” A New York Times headline called him “A Bad Seed.” Wrote the New York Post’s Peter Vecsey on waiting until the Finals were over: “ ‘We didn’t want this situation turned into a circus,’ an official in the team’s chain of fools, er, command, told me with a straight face.”

Knicks officials said Dolan was willing to take Brown back until they met Wednesday, when Brown was defiant and, in the perfect Dolan Twist, they don’t have to pay the $40 million on his guaranteed contract because, among other things, Brown made his roadside comment (“I’m a dead man walking”) to reporters, who flagged him down at a traffic light -- without a Knicks public-relations person present, as required by his contract. No, I’m still not making this up. The real story is: Brown was fired for committing the only sin Dolan cares about, talking candidly. Dolan waited six weeks, thinking Brown would accept a settlement to end his humiliation, then tried to catch Brown breaching his contract by not showing up for work. Finally Dolan had to pull the trigger to end his own humiliation. Thomas will coach the team and might even last longer than one season, since he has to beat only 23 wins to suggest improvement. As they proved, bringing back dutiful but overmatched Don Chaney to coach for a third season after he went 57-88, Dolan doesn’t mind failure as much as candor....

Oh yeah, the draft. Happily, I haven’t had to write about it because it’s the most fluid in decades. There’s not even a consensus yet for No. 1 Toronto, which is still considering LaMarcus Aldridge, Andrea Bargnani and Adam Morrison.