Streak snapped at Sacramento

SACRAMENTO – The last-second heroics belonged to the other guys this time. John Salmons’ coast-to-coast bank lifted the Kings to a 122-120 victory Monday night, snapping the Mavericks’ season-high seven-game winning streak.

“Nobody could really stop each other,” Mavs coach Avery Johnson said. “It seemed the team that got the ball last was going to win.”

The Mavs (26-12) once again had to rally down the stretch, overcoming an eight-point deficit in the final 3 ½ minutes. Dallas rallied from nine down in the last five minutes to beat the Clippers 95-94 on Jerry Stackhouse’s 3-pointer as time expired.

The final basket capped a wild final finish, featuring five ties and two lead changes in the last 1:46. Jason Terry had just knotted it at 120 with 7.0 seconds left when Salmons took the inbounds, spit Devin Harris and Brandon Bass and lofted the ball over Dirk Nowitzki with 2.4 seconds left. Out of timeouts, Terry’s desperation heave from inside halfcourt had a chance, hitting the backboard and rim.

“We’re not going to win many games giving up 122 points,” Johnson said. “We just got broken down all over the place and we didn’t do a protecting the basket, we didn’t do a good job of guarding the dribble. Our support defense wasn’t there. We just had one of our poorer defensive efforts in a while.”

The Mavs returned home after a 2-1 road trip that featured three distinctly different games. The trek started with a wire-to-wire rout at Seattle, continued with a walk-off victory against the Los Angeles Clippers before concluding with the most wall-to-wall game of the bunch.

“Take the good with the bad,” Devin Harris said. “We were on the top end of the stick last game and we’ve got to take in on the chin this game.”