Dallas-Houston: The only real surprise for me. Houston played small for much of the game, playing Yao/Dikembe with T-Mac, Jon Barry/Ryan Bowen, Bobby Sura/Mike James and David Wesley. The appropriate response by Dallas would have been to go small with Nowitzki, Finley, Howard, Stackhouse and Terry, giving it an advantage at four of the five spots. Of course, Avery Johnson (I kept checking their bench to make sure Don Nelson still wasn't coaching them) stubbornly played Dampier 25 minutes, which was suicidal because A) it allowed Houston to guard Nowitzki with T-Mac (bad matchup for Dirk because he couldn't go by him), and B) Dirk had to run around on the defensive end trying to guard smaller shooters. Any time Dallas went small, it would climb back into the game. So why not just stick with it?
As I wrote on Friday, I thought Dallas would KILL Houston in this series. And it still might happen. Sometimes you see that happen in Game 1, when one team tries something so crazy, the other team just doesn't know how to respond like the Rockets' having Wesley guarding Stackhouse or deciding to leave shooters like Finley and Van Horn wide open. Still, if Dallas doesn't switch to a small lineup, if Nowitzki (who seemed soft and scared in Game 1) doesn't start playing like an MVP candidate again, and if T-Mac can really play 47 minutes a game/guard Nowitzki/run Houston's entire offense (he was MJ-esque in Game 1), the Mavs will absolutely get blown out of this series.
(With that said, I watched too many remarkable Nowitzki performances over the course of the season there's no way he could submit consecutive world-class stinkers at home. Dallas takes Game 2. Whether coaching costs it the series remains to be seen.)
