The cloud is starting to lift

Avery Johnson pulled the team together after the 20-game mark for a “talk.” The pow-wow was meant to take some pressure off and refocus on the immediate future.

“I told them, let me worry about all the long-term stuff,” Johnson said Friday night. “This is a great time for our young men. They’re all young men, right? This is a great time in their lives.

“Have some fun, play some basketball and be competitive and play with a lot of energy and stay in the short term for right now. And we tried to give them some short-term goals and I think they responded to our little talk.”

Did he want to emphasize anything in particular?

“Let’s compete,” Johnson said. “Let’s have some energy and pick our heads up. I think they were tricked into thinking that last season was a disgrace. So I had to kind of lay out what other teams have done and lay out where this organization was 10 years ago and where we are now. So we had to lay out a few things and I think they got the message.”

Read the rest of this note in the Mavs-Clippers notebook at mavs.com.