Mavericks will gladly take 30 wins at All-Star break

With a win Tuesday against the Utah Jazz, the Dallas Mavericks would become the 10th team to have at least 30 victories going into the All-Star break.

Such a barometer would be a welcome achievement for a club many experts didn’t expect to accomplish much of anything this season.

“It’s a nice reminder that you’re one of the upper-echelon teams and it’ll be a nice springboard going into the break,” said Donnie Nelson, the Mavs’ president of basketball operations. “But Utah is a tough out.

“They’re tough and long and athletic, and it’s not going to be easy. But it would certainly provide us a nice little pep in our step going into the stretch run.”

The Mavs (29-25) won’t play again until Feb. 19 in Orlando. So the last thing they want to do is sit and stew for 10 days if they’re unable to defeat the Jazz (25-25) in Dallas for the 11th consecutive time.

“We’d love to get 30 wins, we’d love to end on a good note,” forward Dirk Nowitzki said. “This is the longest All-Star break that I’ve ever seen in my 18-year career, so you never want to go on a 10-day break with a loss and just thinking about it all the time — especially a home loss.

“We’ve lost a lot of games already at home this year, and we want to protect home court and feel somewhat decent about what we did here before the [All-Star] break and then get away with a happy feeling.”

Considering his team is only 10-12 since Jan. 1 and only 15-10 at home, coach Rick Carlisle isn’t ready to declare 30 wins a major milestone.

“I don’t know how important it is based on the fact that not everybody’s played the same number of games,” Carlisle said. “We’ve played more than some of the other teams.

“It’s important to get this game because it is the last game [before the All-Star break] and because we want to take some momentum into the break. But we’re not thinking about the results, we’re thinking about the process.”

‘Tough business’

Carlisle was disappointed to hear that the New York Knicks fired coach Derek Fisher on Monday.

“I don’t know the specifics of their internal situation,” Carlisle said. “They were in the midst of a pretty good turnaround until the recent stretch, and it’s unfortunate. Other than that I don’t know what to tell you.”

Fisher played for Carlisle for nine games in 2012 before the guard injured the patellar tendon in his right knee. The Mavericks later granted his request for a release.

After finishing his Knicks’ career with a 23-31 record, Fisher joins Houston’s Kevin McHale, Brooklyn’s Lionel Hollins, Cleveland’s David Blatt and Phoenix’ Jeff Hornacek as coaches who have been fired this season. That puts an already challenging profession under the microscope in a league where sometimes even winning isn’t enough to appease the masses.

“There’s only 30 [NBA head coaches] in the world and there’s a lot involved with them,” said Carlisle, who doubles as the president of the NBA Coaches Association. “It’s a highly competitive league, it’s a league where expectations are not easily managed, and unfortunately this is the byproduct of some of that.

“But Derek Fisher will be fine. He’s a well thought-of guy that’s established himself as a helluva basketball guy in this league. He’ll emerge from this, but coaching is a tough business. There’s just no two ways about it.”

This story was originally published February 8, 2016 at 9:09 PM with the headline "Mavericks will gladly take 30 wins at All-Star break."