Your team went over the line, Mr. Karl, especially against the Mavericks, and everyone knows it. And you don't get a pass from consequences for that just because you finally won a few playoff games.
Dahntay Jones, incidentally, was a sometimes dirty player who Karl loved, but Nuggets management, in agreement with Quest, thought was close to worthless. So when Jones received a relatively low offer from Indiana, the Nuggets did not match.
I was literally forced to do a Thuggets Report this year, since I would have been negligent had I not.
But meanwhile, Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban, looking for revenge not only against the Nuggets but also against losing the 2006 Quest to Shaquille O'Neal, Dywayne Wade, and the rest of the Miami Heat, is clearly truly serious about winning playoff games. So Cuban and his managers have made some significant strategic moves this off season.
The most notable Dallas move is acquiring Suns playoff wins veteran scrapper Sean Marion. Marion is no nonsense tough, and scores a lot of points, more points than Kenyon Martin can or does. In other words, Marion doesn't let his toughness interfere with his actual basketball performance, the way Kenyon Martin sometimes does.
Dallas also now has Cavaliers and Bulls veteran Drew Gooden backing up Dirk Nowitzki at power forward and 6th year man Kris Humphries, from the Raptors, backing up Erick Dampier at center. Neither Gooden nor Humphries are lacking in toughness. Humphries was a Raptors fan favorite precisely because of his hustle and toughness.
To get those three, Dallas shipped out some younger players, perhaps with a little more skill but with substantially less seasoned toughness, if you will. So overall, we are looking at a more seasoned, tougher Dallas team, which apparently was not tough enough to hang with the overly tough Nuggets during the May series.
Whereas whatever the Lakers' actual "toughness quotient" was, it was irrelevant due to their massive skill level and their huge coaching advantage.
The Mavericks may now be tough enough to want to and be able to hang rough with the Thuggets and extract some revenge from them for a few dirty and manhandling incidents during both the regular season and during the playoff series. They may also wish to extract a pound of flesh for the Nuggets' efforts, which were partially successful, to make their owner, Marc Cuban, look like a jerk. In fact, Martin and Cuban had a full scale feud going during most of the year, and it boiled over during the series.
There was another incident in Denver where at the very end of a first half, J.R. Smith heavily elbowed a Maverick in the neck or lower face, and Cuban complained to both the referees and to Smith himself to no effect. Whereupon a holier than thou George Karl tried to lecture the Dallas owner about what a NBA owner is and is not allowed to do when visiting Denver. And whereupon Nuggets fans opined that Cuban is one of the biggest jerks in basketball.
And God only knows how many other "little" incidents there were.
What has Denver been doing to improve their team this off season? Cue the crickets, please.
Given that Dallas has much increased their toughness factor, look for at least some revenge this coming season and, more importantly, look for the Mavericks to at least split games with the Nuggets, instead of losing almost all of them, as they did in 2008-09 due to the Nuggets' very unusual and dangerous to basketball combination of raw but great offensive skill and overdrive defensive roughness.
CHIEF THUGGET KENYON MARTIN SENDS A MESSAGE TO NOWITZKI AND THE MAVERICKS EARLY IN GAME ONE
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DALLAS MAVERICKS 2009 MOST POPULAR VIDEOS PLAYER
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DENVER NUGGETS 2009 MOST POPULAR VIDEOS PLAYER
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[This was a fast break type of posting, a short post needed to be pushed out the door quickly to be timely. In the great majority of cases, a fast break posting is followed up by much longer articles, that will contain a lot of proof for any points made in the fast breaks. Remember that many Quest reports have much more detail than this one; Quest for the Ring prides itself on game, team, and League breakdowns that are as long as necessary to make and prove the points.]
