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When the Mavs beat the Warriors 120-115 back in November at their place, only one thing was missing -- Stephen Jackson. He was serving a seven-game suspension to start the season so he missed out on guarding Dirk Nowitzki, a job he did pretty well in the first round.

With the Warriors in Dallas Wednesday night, I'll have an article that morning looking at the matchup between Dirk and Jackson and the Mavs and Warriors.

While Jackson seemed to really irritate Nowitzki in that series, Jerry Stackhouse was adamant on Monday that it wasn't so much what Jackson did to Nowitzki, but rather what Nowitzki and the Mavs did to themselves.

Here's Stackhouse's take on Jackson's defensive role in the playoffs:

"I just think we didn't take advantage of some of the things that we should have. We weren't aggressive in our moves. We allowed him to play; up until that series, nobody had ever thought of Stephen Jackson as no hell of a defensive player. He was just a guy that could shoot the basketball. He made some big shots for San Antonio when they won the championship that year [2003]. But, he's not no defensive stopper or anything. I think it was moreso what we allowed to happen to us. Like anything basketball is a game of confidence. When they come out and for a game and tell him that he did a good job on Dirk, now all of a sudden he's looking for him. It's up to Dirk to get that back. What's a better opportunity to do that than Wednesday night?"

Hopper15 wrote:heh...calling out a teammate disguised as dissing someone else.

JES12 wrote:If Harris is on Ellis and Avery refuses to play Hassell, who will cover Davis? Jones?

mavfan33 wrote:unfortunately that's probably Terry

DDansby123 wrote:(1) He wasn't "dissing" anybody.
(2) He wasn't "calling out" anybody.
(3) It wasn't disguised.

Hopper15 wrote:-= original quote snipped =-
You can pretty much replace the word "we" with the word "Dirk" in that entire quote unless Jackson was guarding the entire team at once.

DDansby123 wrote:-= original quote snipped =-



Not really. Not if you understand exactly why the Mavs lost that series and follow what the team has said publicly since, anyway.

mistatwo mayn wrote:-= original quote snipped =-


I remember Dirk saying he needed to work on his post game after the series though?
Whatever, I don't see Stackhouse's comments to be negative really. If anything, the season prior, he had said "good thing GS isn't in the playoffs," (this was 2 seasons ago).
The only "public" diss anyone got was when JT and Howard were asked if they were worried about playing GSW if they made it to the playoffs, after which, they laughed it off.