Victory gets Mavs back on the right track

They’re back to having a chance. The Mavericks left Dallas for the West Coast with a renewed confidence and noticeable skip in their step. Exorcising a few demons does that for a team.

The next step is building on that 25-point stomping of Golden State and riding that momentum into a postseason that suddenly appears in better focus. As important as it was on several levels to beat the Warriors, the next rung isn’t any less steep.

The Mavs don’t have the same playoff history with Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, but the thorn driven home by the Pacific Division leaders is just as painful. Bryant, a leading MVP contender, has tortured the Mavs with some pretty scary numbers over the years.

Friday night’s visit to Staples Center is also a possible first round preview, though there’s still plenty to settle in the pairings with less than two weeks left in the regular season. The Mavs (47-28) are seventh in the Western Conference, while the Lakers (51-24) are battling for a top seed. Both have seven games left.

“We’re just trying to play them all out,” Avery Johnson said Thursday before leaving for LA. “Whether we were playing Memphis seven times or San Antonio or Houston, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing. We need to just keep playing good basketball. We need to try to build some momentum and get some sort of swagger.

“Golden State is a team that’s had it against us and this year we’ve had it against them. It was good to see. We just need to keep trying to build some momentum. It’s not the easiest thing to do. We know we’re going to be underdogs going out here to play against the Lakers, but we were underdogs yesterday in a lot of people’s minds playing against the Warriors. We just need to keep fighting.”

Dirk Nowitzki’s moving return just 11 days after suffering a high ankle sprain typified that fighting spirit. The reigning MVP wasn’t moving too well, but he gutted out 27 minutes Wednesday and scored 18. Just the sight of Nowitzki back in uniform lifted the spirits of all those inside American Airlines Center.

“This guy is a man of steel,” Johnson said. “That was the loudest ovation I’ve heard for him last night since I played or now coaching him. You start to get a sense of appreciation sometimes for a guy if he’s not well.”

Nowitzki didn’t have much lift, had trouble moving laterally and was basically a spot-up shooter. After more than a week of intense around-the-clock treatment administered by the training and medical staff, he tested the ankle for the first time Tuesday night. It was sore and stiff Wednesday morning, and he didn’t do much at shootaround. He tested it again before the game.

“I didn’t really know if I should do it or not,” Nowitzki admitted, “but before the game it was good enough for me to go.”

Nowitzki wasn’t out there alone. The effort across the board on both ends of the court produced one of the most complete performances of the season. Johnson challenged his team, in particular Josh Howard, Jason Terry and Jason Kidd, to play as if Nowitzki wasn’t in the lineup. Challenge met.

Howard averaged 30.8 points in the four games Nowitzki missed. He scored 28 against Golden State, grabbed seven rebounds and knocked out five assists. Terry tied a season high with 31 points, nailed three 3-pointers and dished out another six assists. Kidd made it two-thirds of the way to a triple-double with 17 dimes (tying his season high) and 11 boards.

The Mavs also bottled up the league’s highest-scoring team and improved to 22-3 when holding an opponent to less than 90. The 56 rebounds were a season’s best (Golden State had 38) and the 35 assists were also the highest this season. The reason for it all was simple in Johnson’s view.

“The focus, just the focus,” he said. “Focus, but relaxed focus. They were focused on the defensive end. They were a little bit more relaxed on the offensive end, just making the passes, moving and cutting. They took their shots. They took it with confidence.

“We hadn’t had a combination of those things for an extended period of time throughout the course of a game. We finally got it. That’s the game that I’ve been hoping that we could get and we got it last night.”

It was also the first victory over a winning team in the Kidd Era II. After dropping the first 10, the monkey had climbed aboard and was holding on tight.

“I didn’t even think about that,” Nowitzki said. “It’s really like our playoffs started early this year and we’ve got to play with that intensity and focus and play well defensively and move the ball offensively, and that’s really all we’re worried about. All those games we lost against those good teams, I really feel like we were right there. We had our chances to win, but we didn’t.”

The guy associated with that dubious stat didn’t let it change his stride. Now it’s time to take the second step.

“There’s no monkey. That’s up to you guys,” Kidd said to reporters. “You guys can create any animal you want on my back, but I really don’t care. My job is to go out there and play at a high level and win ballgames, and we’re working on doing that. We’re very close, so hopefully this can be something that can get us going in the right direction.”