Adjusting to your Personnel

Dallas Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle is known for slowing his teams down and running many set plays. He used this style and was successful with Detroit and Indiana early in his career. With the athleticism that Dallas has now, along with a point guard in Jason Kidd that can dictate tempo, Carlisle has loosened the reins a bit:

Carlisle, now coaching Dallas, folded up his trusty blue card filled with set plays, tucked it inside his tailored suit and put his confidence in the hands of his point guard.

Carlisle quit micromanaging. He let go. Jason Kidd, a future Hall of Famer, now runs the show.

Kidd, Carlisle and the Mavericks ran all the way to a 50-32 record and first-round blitz of third-seeded San Antonio in the playoffs.

"Night and day," Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said in an e-mail about the effect Carlisle's tactical change had on the team's performance. "It showed the team that Rick trusted them, which in turn picked up the energy and cohesiveness of the team."

Several Mavericks told the Dallas Morning News earlier this season that Carlisle called plays 70 percent to 80 percent of the time during the first three months of season, but just 20 percent to 30 percent of the time after turning it over to Kidd.

"That was real pivotal in us gaining momentum in the second half of the season," Carlisle said in a phone interview earlier this week. "He's such a good player and has such a good pulse on our players that the more he could facilitate off the fly during games was helping our team."

Darrell Armstrong played for Carlisle with the Pacers. They have reunited in Dallas, with Armstrong serving as a "development assistant coach."

He sees the change in Carlisle.

"He's done a great job with the players," Armstrong said. "He tries to communicate with them more and get their thoughts. At the same time, he gets his thoughts across, too. It's also helped Jason out. I haven't seen him talk this much before and I played with him for a year (in New Jersey)."

Carlisle's former point guard in Detroit, Chauncey Billups, also agrees:

“The thing about a good coach is you adjust your schemes to your personnel,” Billups said. “We didn’t run nearly as much as the Mavericks do now with Jason Kidd and the players and athletes they have. They are a fast-breaking kind of team. We ran more halfcourt sets, more bump-and-grind, a more defensive team than the Mavericks are.”

Carlisle's Message to Mavs: Play Harder

This past Wednesday the Dallas Mavericks continued their woes on the road losing by 34 at Milwaukee. This loss was much different though and hurt more afterwards because as this article puts it from the Dallas Morning News they were guilty of the most demeaning crime in sports- not playing hard:

"Hard play is the biggest key to winning in this league, other than having enough talent," Carlisle said. "I love the talent on our team, but we don't have the kind of talent to win on talent alone. That's a fact. And most teams in the league are in the same position. We got to fight every night for wins. It's just never easy."

When the Mavericks go nonchalant, like they did at Milwaukee, they get wiped out.

"We let up a little after that first quarter and thought everything's going to be easy," Dirk Nowitzki said. "Teams are too good in this league. We let them get their rhythm. All of a sudden, everybody started shooting the ball well for them. It was bad. It seemed like we never did get two stops in a row.

"Nothing in this league is going to come easy. You give up 80 percent shooting in two quarters, it's just embarrassing."

At least the Mavericks aren't in denial about that. Their next step is to come to grips with the fact that they haven't left everything on the floor in certain games. Good teams cut down on the number of times they don't show up. Great teams almost never fall into the no-show category.

"It's always going to be a major part of regular-season basketball," Carlisle said. "In the playoffs, everybody plays hard. And there's no coach that isn't preaching it and talking about the importance of it."