Mavericks guard Deron Williams will play against Spurs

When asked two different ways after Thursday’s practice about his injured right hip, point guard Deron Williams didn’t hesitate about his availability for Friday’s game against the San Antonio Spurs.

Williams kept repeating: “I’ll be in the game tomorrow.”

For the Dallas Mavericks, that’s good news during a week when the news hasn’t been so great. And it’s good news for a team facing a rival at 8:30 p.m. at American Airlines Center, which will be nationally televised on ESPN.

Williams suffered a right hip contusion during Monday’s 112-97 loss at Atlanta. That forced him to miss Wednesday’s 93-90 home loss against Miami Heat.

Williams went through Thursday’s practice and is ready to play against the Spurs.

“It’s always tough to sit out,” Williams said. “You always want to be out there.

“I was pretty sore and it was tough to run, so I didn’t want to have a negative effect on the game being out there and hurting the team. With a day in between the next two, another day would do me good.”

With or without Williams, the offense has been practically nonexistent lately. In the previously four games, they’ve averaged only 92.3 points per game, and will be without guard Devin Harris for the seventh consecutive game with a sprained left great toe.

“We’re getting a lot of open looks, we have been all season,” Williams said. “It seems like the open ones are almost harder than the contested ones, and we’ve just got to do a good job of making shots and getting some easy baskets and stop putting so much pressure on ourselves.

“We’re just putting a lot of pressure on ourselves at times to kind of do it ourselves. But we see we’re struggling a little bit on offense and we go into a little bit of ‘let me try to help’ instead of just staying with the plan.”

Overall, the Mavericks have shot less than 40 percent from the field 15 times this season, and they’re only 4-11 under those circumstances. That’s the most games they’ve shot less than 40 percent in a season since the 2004-05 campaign when it occurred 17 times.

While Williams returns, coach Rick Carlisle is dealing with a disappointed Chandler Parsons, who entered the fourth quarter of Wednesday’s game against Miami for the first time with 9:06 on the clock. At the 6:05 mark, Parsons was back on the bench and didn’t return until there were only 17.9 seconds remaining in the game.

Carlisle said a conversation he had with Parsons after the loss to the Heat went well.

“Hey, good players want to play,” Carlisle said. “I love that. At the same time, in coaching you have to make decisions that will be difficult. I did and we’ve got to move on from here.”

Williams’ take

Williams chimed in on recent published reports where the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, took a jab at Dirk Nowitzki and negatively described the Mavericks’ all-time leading scorer as “a one-trick pony.”

“You’re talking about two legends, you’re talking about the No. 1 all-time scorer in the NBA and a guy that’s won championships and has made his imprint on this game, so when he talks people listen,” Williams said. “At the same time, having grown up in the Dirk era and watched what Dirk’s done, I don’t consider him one-dimensional at all.

“So I would disagree with that statement. Like I said, I don’t know what the context was, but I don’t feel that way. If you ask me about Dirk’s game, I don’t feel it’s one-dimensional at all.”

Asked how many dimensions Nowitzki’s game has, Williams said: “Seventeen. I don’t know.”

This story was originally published February 4, 2016 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Mavericks guard Deron Williams will play against Spurs."