Tonight’s game wasn’t beautiful basketball. It was the sort of game you get between two defense-oriented teams who are both having an off shooting night (the Mavericks shot just 31 percent for the first three quarters of the game, and the Hornets made just 66 percent of their free throws). But even though they didn’t get the win, the Mavericks were actually, at times, almost fun to watch as they played hard on defense and kept themselves in this game right down to the very end.
The first quarter was painful to watch. The Mavericks looked like a team on the road, on the second night of a back to back, missing a good portion of their starting line-up (Dirk Nowitzki and Andrew Bogut, along with J.