Mavericks Take My Advice, Fire Avery Johnson. You’re Welcome, Mark Cuban.
ESPN’s Mark Stein is the first to report that the Dallas Mavericks have fired coach Avery Johnson a day after being bounced from the NBA playoffs by the New Orleans Hornets.
Johnson had a tumultuous last few months on the job in Dallas. He was roundly criticized late in the regular season for benching future Hall-of-Famer Jason Kidd, who had just been acquired in a trade, for the final 35 seconds of a game. A few weeks after this, Johnson allegedly got in a shouting match with Mavs’ owner Mark Cuban.
But the most telling sign of Avery’s status with the team might have come the day after Sunday’s game 4 loss to the Hornets. According to reports, Mavericks player Josh Howard, who stirred controversy recently by admitting to smoking pot in the off-season, had a wild birthday party in the hours after game 4. When the team showed up the next day, Johnson demanded to know which players had attended the party. Only a handful admitted to having partied with Howard, but this was enough to send Johnson into a fit of rage during which he called off practice. The team, oblivious to Johnson’s anger, conducted practice itself before boarding the plane for New Orleans.
I think it’s safe to say that the Mavs stopped listening to Avery somewhere along the line. Now they won’t after worry about his nutty late-game benchings of Hall-of-Famers, his yappy sarcastic rants about wanting to be blamed for stuff, and his complete inability to figure out a strategy to slow down Chris Paul. He’s gone. And next year they will have a new coach…possibly Jeff Van Gundy or Del Harris. And neither of them will get Dirk Nowitzki to toughen up either, meaning the Mavs will again fail to win a championship.
Tags: Avery Johnson, Chris Paul, Dallas Mavericks, Del Harris, Dirk Nowitzki, Hornets, Jason Kidd, Jeff Van Gundy, Josh Howard, Mark Cuban, Mark Stein
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- Avery Johnson Didn’t Want to Make the Jason Kidd Trade- Rick Carlisle Will Take Over Coaching the Mavericks
- Avery Johnson Doesn’t Want to Talk About Jason Kidd Rumors
- NBA Playoffs Video: Chris Paul Scores Triple-Double, is Definitely Not Messing Around. Goodbye Mavericks.
- NBA Playoffs Video: Hornets Have Mavericks on Ropes; Jason Kidd Ejected for Flagrant 2
