The Ex Factor

You could blame Steve Nash -- and based on the cold reception he got the other night it’s pretty obvious that basketball fans here do -- but really, given the choice between a five-year, $65-million offer to go, or a four-year, $36-million offer to stay, how fast would you skip town?

So when Nash becomes a two-time most valuable player for the Phoenix Suns, who’s next to blame?

Sure, the guy who wouldn’t pony up the cash that would have kept him a Dallas Maverick.

Funny thing, though. Owner Mark Cuban and the Mavericks have lived to tell about it.

So far, anyway. And just in case there’s any confusion, Cuban says his team, led by its own MVP candidate, Dirk Nowitzki, doesn’t have to beat the Suns in the Western Conference finals to prove he made the right move in letting Nash go.

“I don’t need to get ‘right’ on anything,” Cuban said Thursday in an e-mail. “Everyone in this organization is doing everything they can to win a championship. That’s all we care about. What other teams or players do is irrelevant.

“Let’s put this up there as a question that isn’t tough, but closer to the ridiculousness of friends trying to bait you into an argument about your wife versus former girlfriends. ‘She’s definitely hotter and cooler, no she isn’t, yes she is. OK, cooler but not hotter.’

“It’s a waste of time to go through the exercise unless the beer is very, very cold and there is nothing else you can possibly think of to talk about.”

The reality, though, is that the Nash debate remains as hot as Dallas in July. The Mavericks may have moved on without him -- they did, after all, come within a few games of posting the best record in the West, then eliminated the team that did, the San Antonio Spurs, in the second round of the playoffs -- but they’ve been having trouble moving past him.

The Nash-led Suns eliminated the Mavericks in the West semifinals last season and they took a 1-0 series lead Wednesday with their stringy-haired, pinwheel-limbed point guard going for 27 points and 16 assists against his old team.

Not that Nowitzki hasn’t done his part as the Mavericks’ shiniest star.

A graceful 7-footer from Germany with a soft outside touch, Nowitzki has worked on his rebounding and defense. He averaged 26.6 points and shot 48% this season, both career highs. He also averaged nine rebounds and 1.02 blocked shots. Only Nash and LeBron James had more MVP votes.

Nash and Nowitzki remain close friends, but there might not have been room for both to develop together the way they have individually over the last two seasons.

“I think it would have been very unlikely I would have been MVP if I had stayed here,” Nash said Thursday.

“First of all, Dirk would be the focal point, rightfully so. I would have always been trying to get him going and facilitate his success, which is great. I loved playing with him. But it’s not going to necessarily highlight the improvements I make as much as it has going to a team that wasn’t in the playoffs, and now we’ve been in the Western Conference finals twice.”

Said Nowitzki: “Since he is gone, I am making more plays for my teammates and I have expanded my game.”

Cuban was more direct than his five-time All-Star when asked if Nash had to leave for Nowitzki to become an MVP contender.

“That’s the only way,” Cuban said. “It had to be his team.”

The Mavericks are almost as enjoyable to watch as the Suns and their barnstorming style. Second-year point guard Devin Harris seared Nash for a career-high 30 points in Game 1. Josh Howard is a well-rounded, energetic small forward in only his third season. Nowitzki, who can score inside and out, is only 27.

But until Harris proves to be more consistent at the point, Nash will own talk-of-the-town status whenever the Suns and Mavericks play.

At Wednesday’s game, Mavericks fans still seemed to fault him for taking the Suns’ money, booing him during introductions. One fan held up an “MVPlease” sign, complete with an artist’s rendition of Kobe Bryant dunking over Nash, as had happened in the first round.

Other fans delighted in a Nowitzki cartoon image on the scoreboard singing, “Don’t let your babies grow up to be Suns’ fans,” which, curiously, included some mild anti-Nash rhetoric that belied their friendship.

The Suns couldn’t have been happier after moving swiftly to sign Nash on the first day of the free-agency period in July 2004. But Cuban, in a 49-paragraph entry on his blog, defended his decision at the time to let Nash go, citing durability concerns and the uncertain business climate of the league, which faced an expiring collective-bargaining agreement in the summer of 2005.

“I obviously took a ton of heat,” he said Thursday. “That’s part of the business. The only thing that was irritating was all the stupid e-mails I got from people. I had to write scripts to automate deleting them and that was a pain.”

The Mavericks used the money earmarked for Nash to acquire center Erick Dampier in a sign-and-trade with Golden State, picking up the tab for Dampier’s seven-year, $73-million contract. Touted as the big man they desperately needed, Dampier has averaged 7.2 points and 8.1 rebounds in two seasons.

Nash, who was originally drafted by the Suns in 1996, averaged 17.2 points and 11 assists over the same span, and missed a total of 10 games.

Through it all, he still has at least one believer in Dallas.

“Steve is a great player that is in a system that is absolutely perfect for him with a coach that uses him perfectly,” Cuban said.

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Raising his game

A look at what Steve Nash averaged in his last two seasons in Dallas and his two MVP seasons in Phoenix (regular-season statistics):

WITH PHOENIX

*--* Seasons (Team record) G Min FG% 3PT% FT% PTS REB AST 2005-06 (54-28) 79 35.4 51.2 43.9 92.1 18.8 4.2 10.5 2004-05 (62-20) 75 34.3 50.2 43.1 88.7 15.5 3.3 11.5

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WITH DALLAS

*--* Seasons (Team record) G Min FG% 3PT% FT% PTS REB AST 2003-04 (52-30) 78 33.5 47.0 40.5 91.6 14.5 3.0 8.8 2002-03 (60-22) 82 33.1 46.5 41.3 90.9 17.7 2.9 7.3

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