Yes, the Mavs can be headdeskingly frustrating to watch at times, and if you have young children, you should just permanently outfit them with earmuffs until the team’s post season play is over. These are all facts we can agree on.
After the fetal-position inducing Game 4 against Portland, the Dallas Morning News‘ Jean-Jacques Taylor apparently wrote a column that, according to former DMN writer Ed Bark, eviscerated the team. Taylor apparently said the team was “gutless.” I say apparently, because the Taylor’s musings are so valuable the paper has put them behind their paywall, meaning anyone who isn’t paying to read the paper or the website is now bereft of Jean-Jacques Taylor columns.
I will pause in case you’re sad. Uncle Barky took exception to Taylor’s descriptor, and then noted that after that diatribe, Taylor has been silent when it comes to the Mavs, even though they won Game 5 and gutted out Game 6 in Portland last night. “The only way to follow up a column like that is to show up for future games,” Bark wrote. “In print at least, Taylor so far hasn’t been courageous enough to do that.”
And then, in the comments of Bark’s post, Tracy Rowlett weighed in with his disapproval as well, saying, in part,, that it was “downright cowardly not to man up after blistering the pride of any individual player or team.”
Now, one might argue that Taylor only does what he is assigned by editors to do. But Bark says that if he had demanded to go to Portland, the DMN would’ve sent him. But did it require a trip to Portland? I mean, if you’re only going to comment on the game, can’t you do that surfing the couch and watching TNT?
