DALLAS _ Before the game, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wanted to make something perfectly clear.
"I'll tell you one thing right now: We definitely aren't tanking," he said. "We're going for the playoffs."
It wasn't an ideal moment to make such a proclamation. Friday night's opponent was Milwaukee, possessor of the NBA's best record, and predictably the Bucks and MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo won, 122-107 at American Airlines Center despite a franchise-record-tying 22 3-pointers by Dallas on 53 attempts.
"I'm not interested in the 3-point record," Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said. "I'm interested in the level of resistance."
Which in Friday's case was "very little," as the Mavericks allowed 80 points in the paint.
"If that's not an NBA record, I don't know what is," Carlisle said. "Eighty points in the paint is just ridiculous. That's how bad our interior defense was."
Antetokounmpo scored 29 points and pulled down 17 rebounds and the 41-13 Bucks led 83-60 five minutes into the third quarter, before the Mavericks rallied with a barrage of 3-pointers.
All told, the Bucks gave the Mavericks (25-29) an indicator of how difficult a first-round matchup would be against the top team in the West, currently Golden State, if Dallas somehow climbs to the eighth playoff spot.
Yes, I'm aware: In three meetings against the Warriors this season the Mavericks are 1-3 and the games have been decided by three, four and five points.
Those games, though, were played before Dallas traded four-fifths of its starting lineup and lost J.J. Barea to an Achilles rupture, departures that accounted for 60 percent of the Mavericks' scoring.
Cuban's no-tanking vow, though, is the correct message and the right path for the Mavericks during the season's final 28 games.
And it's a unified message also voiced by president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson and Carlisle, though the coach mused on his weekly 103.3 FM show Friday: "There's not many people are giving the Mavs much of a chance (to make the playoffs)."
Recall that it was last Feb. 18 on "Dr. J" Julius Erving's podcast that Cuban was too candid for his own good, later admitting "I got excited talking to Dr. J. and said something I shouldn't have."
What Cuban told The Doctor was: "I'm probably not supposed to say this, but I just had dinner with a bunch of our guys the other night. And here we are (18-40). We weren't competing for the playoffs. I was like, 'Losing is our best option.' "
For his honesty, Cuban was fined $600,000 for what NBA Commissioner Adam Silver deemed "public statements detrimental to the NBA."
