NEW ORLEANS – Whatever happens Tuesday night in New Orleans, the Mavericks are coming home. It’s either to play another game or face another offseason of questions and uncertainty.

That point was reached after Sunday’s disappointing 13-point loss, leaving New Orleans one victory shy of advancing to the Western Conference semifinals. Trailing the best-of-7 series 3-1 with Game 5 on the Hornets’ floor, the Mavs need three straight wins to hold off an early summer.

“We’re still alive,” Johnson said Monday from the team hotel. “We’re playing this game tomorrow and we have every reason in the world to think that we can win it.”

They’re not going to win all three Tuesday. The one-game-at-a-time mantra is cliché, but it’s also the only approach left. The Mavs departed Monday afternoon for New Orleans after a rare players-only practice.

Johnson met with the team before canceling the scheduled workout. The players then decided to get on the court anyway without the coaching staff, conceivably to work out a few things amongst themselves. Johnson welcomed the move.

“I don’t know if we need another drill,” he said. “We’ve been having drills and scrimmages and a lot of things since the first day of training camp, and if you don’t have it by now, I don’t know if you’re going to have a Cliff Notes session and get it.

“I was thinking about just keeping the legs fresh and meeting on the plane, but they decided that they needed to go down on the court and do something. We’ll see what type of carryover it has.”

The move can be viewed as a last-ditch effort by the players to take ownership of the team. Not having the coaches around the day before an elimination game appears risky, though Johnson is quite familiar with player-only practices. He presided over several during his playing days with the Mavs.

“We’ve got to get this thing turned around,” Josh Howard said.

Howard could just as easily be talking about himself. The fifth-year small forward has sunk into a shooting slump at precisely the wrong time. Howard and Dirk Nowitzki are supposed to be the team’s 1-2 scoring punch. Both are swinging. Nowitzki is the only one connecting.

“Shots just not going down right now,” Johnson said of Howard, who is shooting 26 percent. “Obviously, we know it is not the best of timing, but again it can turn around in our next game. It can turn around and you can forget about what happened in the first four games.

“But it is not going to turn around without persistent penetration. It’s not going to turn around with bad decisions. We have to make better decisions. We got to penetrate. We got to move the ball. And then when we get down by 12 or 13 points or whatever it was at that time, we can’t have a homerun play where we try to make a 13-point play and get back in the game. We have to do it possession by possession.”

Johnson’s summation of Game 4 couldn’t be more on the money. A solid first quarter, which seemed to build on Game 3’s win, was followed by 36 minutes of mostly poor decisions and uninspired play. The same was true in the second half of the series opener and throughout the second game.

“Everybody has to be in attack mode,” said Nowitzki, averaging 28 points and 11.3 rebounds. “We’ve got to make shots to win in this league. They doubled-teamed some of our scorers, so if we swing the ball on the weak side, you still got to make plays and that’s what this league comes down to.

“We shot 36 percent at home. That’s tough. The second game in New Orleans we shot 32 percent and this sport is still about scoring points, and we just haven’t had a great offensive series.”

Nowitzki, Jason Terry and Brandon Bass did produce in Game 4, but the same wasn’t true for Howard and Jason Kidd. The Hornets, on the flip side, are getting consistent production from their main trio – Chris Paul, David West and Peja Stojakovic – and are playing with a sense of urgency.

Kidd hasn’t had the playoff impact the front office envisioned. The Mavs bench has bordered on nonexistent, especially stacked up to New Orleans’ reserves. And though no one inside the Mavs locker room is conceding defeat, doubts have been raised regarding the team’s resolve. How else does one explain Game 4 when so much, namely a tied series, was at stake?

“The guys wanted it,” Jerry Stackhouse countered. “We just went about it the wrong way and it got out of control.”

The same could be said about the series. The Mavs have dropped eight consecutive road playoff games and were just 17-24 away from home this season. But the Hornets hadn’t won in Dallas in a decade until Sunday.

“We have to be confident and again there’s no pressure on us,” Kidd said. “We just have to relax and play and take one quarter at a time. If we can do that then we can send it to another game.”