Done

- I don't even know what to say today.

Mostly Cloudy Forecast: Dark Days Without Dirk

By Marc Stein
ESPN.com

DALLAS -- Not as bad as it looked on TV?

There's a chance that sentiment might actually wind up applying to the stomach-turning twisting and folding that Dirk Nowitzki's left leg did Sunday afternoon.

As for the Dallas Mavericks' standing in the Western Conference race, well, that's as disturbing as it appears on pretty much any screen you choose. Television, computer, handheld, whatever.

If Nowitzki misses the next two weeks, as Mavs owner Mark Cuban fears, Dallas will have to play three games without the reigning MVP against its two nearest rivals in the race to clinch the West's seventh and eighth seeds, as well as road games against the Lakers and Suns. The seven games on the schedule in this two-week span include a Thursday trip to No. 9 Denver -- which can clinch the season-series tiebreaker with a victory -- and a home-and-home with No. 8 Golden State.

But this might be the truly troubling part:

Even if Nowitzki were to make it back faster somehow -- if the damage he sustained in Sunday's 88-81 loss to San Antonio was purely in the "left lower leg" as the Mavs described it and not his left knee -- Dallas has no guarantees that it'll be way better off.

That's how discombobulated and unsure Nowitzki's team looks these days, as it braces for a stretch with five out of six games on the road after Tuesday's presumed home gimme against the Clippers.

As Mavs swingman Jerry Stackhouse summarized it: "You and everybody else in the dang Dallas world knows that a lot of what we do revolves around Dirk. So if he's out, you can't just abandon everything and start something new on the fly. We haven't had success trying to tweak this thing on the fly yet. We need him to heal up. Fast."

The latest update on the tweaking leads to more unpleasant reading for the Mavs. After this fall-from-ahead defeat, they've dropped to 0-8 against teams with winning records since making the Jason Kidd trade.

They had targeted the past week as maybe the season's most pivotal, with visits from the Lakers on Tuesday, Boston on Thursday and San Antonio on Easter. After painfully narrow losses in the first two games -- and a loud blowup between Cuban and coach Avery Johnson in between after the Mavs fell into a 25-point hole against L.A. -- Dallas was hoping to follow the Phoenix blueprint and turn this Sunday afternoon showcase with the Spurs into a turning point.

Phoenix, remember, launched its first good spell in the Shaquille O'Neal era with an ABC home victory over the Spurs two Sundays back. Cuban even tried to lessen the tension and add to the flipping-the-page karma here by showing up in an "Avery's Team" T-shirt that he proudly grabbed and popped as he walked down an American Airlines Center corridor before tipoff.

Dallas then went out and celebrated Kidd's 35th birthday with a full-blown nightmare at lunchtime. Tim Duncan shot 1-for-10 in the first half, Tony Parker shot 4-for-21 overall and the Mavs wound up collapsing against a vulnerable opponent that, just like Boston, didn't even manage to shoot 35 percent from the floor. After two Nowitzki free throws made it 54-42 roughly halfway through the third quarter, Dallas began settling for jumpers and stagnating in the halfcourt, leading to the surrender of 19 consecutive points.

San Antonio had scored 14 of those 19 in a row by the time Nowitzki's left leg was pinned and pressed by the landing of Ime Udoka after Nowitzki's blocked Udoka's driving layup. Which is another way of saying that the Mavs' confidence was already draining away when they were subjected to the frightful sight of their franchise player going down in what to some had the look of a season-ending heap.

History says Nowitzki will actually rebound faster than anyone who saw the footage would dare imagine … as long as the damage is restricted to the ankle area. He's done it so many times that he makes you think he has bionic ankles, with one theory in Mavsland suggesting that Nowitzki -- thanks to years of countless deep-knee bends and other unorthodox exercises with his German mentor Holger Geschwindner -- can play through ankle sprains so easily because of his world-class flexibility.

But his team, with or without Nowitzki, is out of wiggle room. The Mavs are only 9-8 since Kidd arrived -- with Kidd himself managing to score only 10 points over the past three games with defenses sagging off him more and more -- and thus prompted a bit of a press-room scramble Sunday. More than one scribe was moved to double-check and make sure that the first-round pick which Dallas sent to New Jersey as part of the Kidd trade is indeed lottery-protected, because the team that made a run at 70 wins last season might be forced to use that pick if it can't win a few games over the next two weeks.

Which only puts more pressure on Kidd, whether or not Nowitzki can soon go, at a time when Johnson says teams "are playing five in the paint on us" and when Kidd is increasingly tentative in halfcourt sets. He's admittedly struggling to find a way to "be myself and just play" or to "stop thinking and just react."

"… Losing three in a row, whether it's at home or on the road, is not a good place to be," Johnson conceded. "We'll talk to them again and pick them up. Hopefully they'll come into practice tomorrow with a renewed sense of optimism, knowing that the season is not over."

If you were watching on this painful Easter Sunday, that might have been the best thing anyone could say about the Mavs' season.