Weekend of wins nice, but stay calm By DALE ROBERTSON

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/sports/bk/bkn/rox/2438294

March 8, 2004, 1:10AM
Weekend of wins nice, but stay calm
By DALE ROBERTSON
Remember when whipping up on the Mavericks was a mundane occurrence, as part of the normal daily routine as clearing the dishes, brushing one's teeth and walking the dog?

In the Mav-wreck era of the 1990s, there was no honor in defeating Dallas and horrible shame in failing to do so. But then somehow the Mavs got good, and the dynamic changed completely. Such are the circumstances in 2004 that we can comfortably proclaim the Rockets' 101-98 victory on Sunday their most consequential of the season despite its myriad flaws.

There are caveats, though.

The Mavericks, it must be noted, are in a regressive mode, particularly when they venture beyond the retro confines of American Airlines Center. They won't win 60 games this season as they did last season, because they've become a badly out-of-tune traveling band. Other than Miami and Cleveland, both still viable postseason contenders only by virtue of their geographic good fortune, none of the NBA's likely playoff teams has an appreciably worse record away from home than Dallas' 11-19.

"If we want to do anything in the playoffs," Dirk Nowitzki conceded, "we have to start winning on the road."

As for the Rockets, here's the deal: If they lose to the Clippers on Tuesday night, consider the happy assessment of Sunday's events to be null and void. It has to be thus because Houston's halting an 0-6 streak vs. the Mavericks -- plus an 0-13 swoon vs. the NBA's Texas contingent -- can't be evaluated as a stand-alone accomplishment.

The pieces of the long season are interconnected. They must be judged as they relate to the whole. While we embrace the Rockets for beating the Mavs in front of a national TV audience after having paddled the Timberwolves in Minnesota on Friday night -- also their most wow-inducing back-to-back smackdowns of the year -- the significance of same awaits further review.

Check with us in mid-April. If the Rockets are comfortably ensconced in the second season for the first time in five years, what happened on the evening of March 5 and the afternoon of March 7 did matter. Don't take it just from me, either. First, listen to Mo Taylor, one of the Rockets' ranking locker-room philosophers.

"Today doesn't do anything really if we lose the next one," Taylor said. "This doesn't have anything to do with the next game. The goal we have for the end of the season is to make the playoffs. This is a win to help us go in that direction.

"But at the same time, we're not looking at it like a championship game or a playoff game. It was a regular win. We needed it, and we got it. Now, we have to focus on the next team."

The Rockets' head shrink, Jeff Van Gundy, echoed Taylor's sentiments.

"Everybody wants you to declare as a coach that you've `arrived,' " Van Gundy said. "But there are no corners, you know. You never turn the corner. It's a straight-line sprint for 82 games. It's not about a declaration. We have another game that's going to be very difficult Tuesday and then another one. ... What you do is you try to get better."

It's hard to argue the Rockets achieved that against Dallas (39-23) in what Van Gundy labeled "a discombobulated effort." Consider that they had already exceeded their season high for turnovers before the fourth quarter began and would finish with 30, an unacceptable sum for even the lowliest of lottery-bound slugs. (Van Gundy: "Obviously, our ball-handling was suspect.")

But although they couldn't handle the rock, they could handle adversity -- right on through a final horn that took forever in coming, and that's how they put the brakes on a two-game home losing streak against a team they match up poorly against.

Van Gundy insisted he was proud of his Rockets for how they set their jaws and refused to yield to largely self-induced frustration, plucking a victory from the rubble of a terribly messy battlefield. For two hours and 39 minutes, they flailed away, ultimately feeding Nowitzki about as often as they found Yao Ming.

The wonderfully ascendant Yao was on the receiving end of enough passes to score 29 points -- the last three coming on a power layup plus a free throw to effectively seal the Mavericks' fate -- while Nowitzki was afforded the chance to make nine steals.

Had the German gunner shot as well as we have come to expect him to, his rampant thievery would have surely spelled doom for the Rockets. After drilling three of his first four attempts, however, Nowitzki went 4-for-15 the rest of the way, a hugely relevant statistic in a three-point game.

Because Van Gundy was in, for him anyway, a complimentary mood afterward, he credited his players' defensive mettle for Dirk's abundant bricks. Maybe they deserved the kudos; maybe they didn't. It doesn't matter. The fact is Notwitzki failed to destroy the Rockets, as he often does. Nor, praise be, did Steve Nash, Michael Finley or Antawn Jamison.

To paraphrase both Mo and Billy Shakespeare -- or should I say Gertrude Stein? -- just as a rose is a rose, a win is a win. But basketball is a "what have you done for us lately" business. Beating Minnesota and Dallas won't mean squat should losses to the Clippers and the Hornets follow.