The Dallas Mavericks have insisted that there is a method to the madness of dismantling a championship roster and reassembling with veteran one year deals.

By now, we all know about the summer of 2012 and the two big names the Mavericks are prepared to go after in Dallas native, Deron Williams and Dwight Howard.

Well, you can count Tracy McGrady among the people who believe the Mavericks’ master plan will work. In an interview with Yahoo! McGrady says that the Mavericks will end up with Williams and Howard next year.

Full quotes after the jump.

“If it’s just Dwight and D-Will, he’s better off just staying in Orlando. You want to go to a team that’s championship caliber, and just him and D-Will won’t get it done. There’s got to be other pieces around to make it look sweet.”

….

D-Will is from Dallas,” McGrady said. “You’ve got Dirk Nowitzki there. They’re going to have [cap space] there. That looks sweet. Dirk. D-Will. And then you get Dwight Howard. That’s it, right there.”

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“I’ve been watching Orlando play, and I think they let it go too far – to where they can’t compete for a championship,” McGrady said. “Dwight’s going to find a sweeter spot for him next year with him being a free agent, with D-Will being a free agent, and Dallas already having an established star there. … Yup, Dallas.”

And then he laughed and said, “You heard it from me first.”

Keep planting that seed and there’ll be a vet minimum deal in it for you, T-Mac.

Given the Mavericks’ drastic cost-cutting moves following their NBA championship victory last June, no one should be shocked that they’re struggling out of the gates this season. Just ask their former center, Tyson Chandler. Per the NY Post: “Chandler is now away from the Mavericks, who have started 0-2 and been outscored by a combined 33 points in the defeats. Chandler said he is not surprised by the early slide. ‘Honestly, I kind of saw it coming because when you put a team in a situation where you say, ‘You’re the defending champions, but we’re not necessarily trying to repeat,’ and when I say that, I’m not saying that they don’t have the pieces there, I obviously think very highly of those guys, but I say that because they offered everybody one-year deals,’ he said. ‘So they knew nobody was going to necessarily accept that. … And when you have veteran guys in the locker room, the type of guys they got, in this time of their career, it’s tough to face that. I think they’re just going through a little lull right now. But I’m hoping for those guys that it turns around because there’s truly good guys in that locker room.’”

DALLAS: NBA champions Dallas Mavericks looked nothing like the team that lifted the trophy last June as they stumbled to a second defeat in as many nights on Monday, this time to the Denver Nuggets.

Denver hammered the hapless Mavericks 115-93, a day after the Miami Heat routed them in their Christmas Day season-opener in a rematch of last season’s championship series.

Dallas trailed Denver 97-68 after three quarters and were down by as many as 33 points in the final period.

“Obviously, we look old and slow and out of shape,” said Dirk Nowitzki, the Most Valuable Player of the NBA finals. “That’s a bad combination. I still think this team has a lot of potential. We just need to work.”

Coach Rick Carlisle shouldered much of the blame.

“It’s on all of us, but it’s on me more than anybody, not having these guys ready to play,” Carlisle said. “I’ve got to look at this very closely and then come Wednesday we’ve got to go back at it.”

The extended lockout that delayed the start of the season until December has every team struggling to hit their stride with little pre-season preparation.

But Carlisle said that was no excuse for a performance that had fans booing their title-holding team.

“I’m the head coach and it’s my job to make sure that these guys are ready to play, and it’s clear that they’re not,” Carlisle said.

“Coach always tries to take the blame if some stuff doesn’t go right,” Nowitzki said. “But we got a lot of veteran guys. We got to keep on working and eventually turn the corner.”

The compressed 66-game schedule means each team faces a more demanding fixture list than normal.

Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers are getting an early taste of that intensity with three games in as many days to open the season.

They lost the first by one-point to Chicago, and the second a day later in a 100-91 defeat to the Kings in Sacramento.

Now they must try to regroup for their home game against Utah.

The Orlando Magic, beaten at Oklahoma City on Sunday, bounced back with a 104-95 home win over Houston.

The Thunder notched their second win in as many nights, defeating Minnesota 104-100 to deny the Timberwolves’ Spanish sensation Ricky Rubio a victory in his long-anticipated NBA debut.

The 20-year-old Rubio, who made his Spanish league debut at the age of 14, was drafted by the Timberwolves in the 2009 NBA draft but had spent the last two years at Barcelona.

Having finally arrived, Rubio looked confident and came off the bench to hand out six assists with five points and five rebounds in 26 minutes without a turnover.

Minnesota edged ahead by a point three times in the fourth quarter, but couldn’t hold off the Thunder’s All-Star duo of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

Even so, the Timberwolves were pleased with the energy on the court and among the standing-room-only crowd of 19,406 fans.

“We didn’t play our best game and we still had them down to the last minute,” Minnesota’s All-Star forward Kevin Love said. — AFP

Through the first two games of the 2011-2012 season, the defending champion Dallas Mavericks have shown little on the court that would even remotely resemble that of the best team in the NBA.

Some of this is understandable, as the Mavs have lost some key contributors from last season’s remarkable Finals run. Dallas is missing it’s defensive MVP from last season in Tyson Chandler, it’s best perimeter defender in DeShawn Stevenson and a spark plug off the bench in J.J. Barea.

However, the team’s lackluster effort thus far in the young season likely could not be described as understandable. With talented veterans Lamar Odom, Vince Carter and Delonte West coming aboard; the Mavericks were expected to be able to weather the storm early-on this season as the team gelled throughout the year.

This has not happened.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Mavericks’ head coach Rick Carlisle said after the team’s banner raising blunder against the Miami HEAT. “Every day we’re going to have to make some gradual strides to get better, so that’s where we’re at. We had some stretches where we got some traction, but our consistency is not there. We’ve got to keep studying and keep working on it.”

After last night’s 115-93 beat down at the hands of the Denver Nuggets, Dallas is now 0-2 on the season and has fallen behind by 30 or more points in each of those contests. Because of furious runs by the Mavs’ reserves in each of those games, neither final score was reflective of the type of effort Dallas exhibited on either end of the floor.

Aside from West, who has shown flashes of what he can do in leading the Mavs bench during garbage time, the other two Mavericks’ offseason acquisitions have failed to live up to the billing of their former All-Star pedigree. Odom is a combined 2-16 from the field to start his career with Dallas and was ejected from the first contest have arguing with an official, and Carter has been largely relegated to the bench during key stretches for the Mavs.

The aforementioned Carter, who started at the two-spot against the HEAT but was benched at halftime and subsequently came of the pine last night against Denver, believes this team can and will play better going forward.

“No excuses,” Carter told HOOPSWORLD Sunday evening. “We’ve got to find a way, plain and simple. We’ve just got to figure out how we can get it done. Everybody’s dealt the same deck of cards, its just who can figure it out the fastest.”

Two of the biggest factors in the Mavs’ poor start this season, rebounding and defense, have been embarrassingly inept through two games. Dallas has allowed each team to shoot nearly 49 percent from the field and were out-rebounded by a combined 30 boards against the HEAT and Nuggets.

Aside from turning back time and deciding to keep Chandler from signing with the New York Knicks, a revival of energy and a focus on continuity are the only things that can help Dallas get back to playing championship-style basketball. With not much time between games and a shortened overall schedule, this team must find a way to speed up that process if it hopes to be a contender in April.

“We’re going to have to play a lot better basketball and we’re going to have to forge an identity with this team,” Carlisle said. “It’s a different team and that’s work. It’s going to take work,  it’s going take honesty and it’s not going to be easy.

“We’ve got to work to make quantum leaps as quickly and as often as we can.”

The one positive for Dallas going forward is the simple fact that there are still 64 games left on the schedule. With the type of talent that still resides on this team, namely former NBA and Finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki, a strong run deep into the playoffs should still be a realistic possibility.

“I think we’ll be OK.  I think we’re going to make it happen sooner than later,” Mavs’ forward Shawn Marion told HOOPSWORLD.  “One game at a time, man… Just one game at a time, that’s all you can do.”

It’s way too early to start throwing out absolutes here in regards to what this team is going to be going forward but it’s difficult to simply shrug off the disturbing lack of effort the starters of this team have exuded through the first two days of the season. Energy has nothing to do with chemistry and this squad’s demeanor suggests a Finals hangover is in desperate need of getting a remedy.