Stack: Better suited for the playoffs

The Mavs (41-23) are seventh in the Western Conference, but it’s a misleading seventh. They’re only four games back of the first-place Lakers. (Yes, they’re also 2 ½ up on ninth-place Denver.)

It’s not as if the Mavs are four games under .500 and seventh in the East. So when Jerry Stackhouse was asked today why the team is struggling to be a “powerhouse,” he was understandably taken aback a bit.

“If you look around the conference there’s a lot of parity,” he said. “I don’t think it’s mediocre parity. I just there are a lot of good teams in this league and we have to play each other. With the record that we have, I don’t think we’re struggling so much. We’ve had some in-season changes. We got off to a little bit of an up-and-down start of the season.

“We might be better suited to go into the playoffs this year than we were last year. I think we had so many highs and somewhat of an easy road during the regular season last year, when we got to the playoffs and saw a little bit of adversity, we didn’t handle it well. Obviously, we’ve dealt with some adversity through the course of the regular season, so maybe that will help us this time around.”