A day that began with a doctored photograph of DeAndre Jordan wearing satanic horns on the front page of a local sports section ended with the Clippers having a devil of a time taking care of their business.
In between there was raw excitement from the crowd, a bit of extra intensity on the court and the spurned Mavericks showing that, for a game at least, they didn’t need the big man who changed his mind and changed their season — if not their foreseeable future.
This was the way everyone in Dallas believed it was going to be for those few heady days last summer when Jordan committed to making the jump to Texas with the four-year, $80-million free agent offer. The Mavericks would be feisty, ferocious and able to stand up to and take down the elite of the tough Western Conference.
Instead it might have been just an emotional blip on the radar screen for a Dallas team struggling to find an identity and a hurdle that Jordan simply had to clear, survive and move on.
The crowd of 19,805 at American Airlines Center arrived early and booed Jordan from the first moment he jogged out onto the court with his teammates for pregame warmups. They booed him loud in the layup line, louder during the introduction of the starting lineups and loudest like the roar of a jet engine when the notoriously poor free-throw shooter was intentionally fouled and sent to the line on three straight possessions in the fourth quarter.
It was a 118-108 win on a night that many leather-lunged Dallas fans had circled on their calendars from the day the 2015-16 schedule was announced in August. It was payback for Jordan’s betrayal. But for the Mavericks themselves it was simply redemption for a virtual no-show effort 24 hours earlier in a desultory loss in New Orleans.
“That (loss) was embarrassing,” said Mavericks star forward Dirk Nowitzki. “This was fun, almost a playoff atmosphere.”
The Dallas fans booed Jordan every time that he touched the ball during the 27 minutes that he played. They jeered when he missed his first two shots of the night on moves down in the low post and they erupted in derision when he scored his first bucket by slamming home an alley-oop pass from Chris Paul.
One sign in the stands read: “DeAndre Jordan’s word is worse than his free throw %.”
Jordan finished shooting 3-for-5 from the field, 3-for-9 from the foul line, scored nine points, grabbed 11 rebounds and blocked one shot. His plus/minus figure of -23 was the worst of any player in the game.
“I thought it was going to be a lot worse, honestly,” Jordan said of the reception. “But it was cool. They’re obviously going to boo and heckle a little bit, but I thought it was going to be a lot worse. Ultimately, we came out here to win a basketball game and that was it.”
Jordan did not want to go back over the the soap opera episode of the summer when he reversed course on his decision and it touched off a surreal day of hiding out in his Houston house with his Clipper teammates and started a bizarre war of emojis on Twitter. But Doc Rivers took on the subject.
“I’m gonna repeat this for the 1,000th time, so all the Dallas fans can hear it one more time,” said the Clippers coach. “He had one chance to get it right and no matter how long it took to get that (correct), he had that right. Because teams do it all the time. It’s amazing how often teams change their mind on players. They sign free agents, tell them they’re gonna be there for the rest of their lives and then they cut them or trade them.
“I think he handled it fine. His job was to get it right. We can argue over how he did it or which way.”
The job of the Mavericks front office has been to put a team around the 37-year-old Nowitzki that could contend one more time for a championship before the end of his Hall of Fame career and Jordan was supposed to be the centerpiece of that effort, giving them a big man to control the middle. Instead their biggest free agent signing was guard Wes Matthews coming off Achilles tendon surgery, veteran Deron Williams trying to put his career back together after a lost era with the Nets and big man JaVale McGee, who has been injured and not yet able to play.
“I think the fans hold the grudge a little bit longer, as we saw today,” Nowitzki said. “We moved on a long, long time ago. We probably moved on July 10 when he re-signed. We had to move on as a franchise. That’s what we did. We got some players here. We got some veteran players that want to play together, that want to be here first of all. So that was that.”
Fran Blinebury has covered the NBA since 1977. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter.
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