Mavs celebrated Kidd’s birthday with 110-91 win over Rockets

Dallas Mavericks coach Jason Kidd couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present than what his players presented him with on Wednesday night.

On a day Kidd celebrated his 49^th birthday, not only did the Mavs defeat the Houston Rockets, 110-91, at American Airlines Center. But the stars aligned to the point that the team which went into Wednesday night’s action right in front of the Mavs in the Western Conference standings – the Utah Jazz – lost to the Boston Celtics, 125-97.

That means the Mavs and Jazz are now locked in a virtual tie for the No. 4 seed out West with identical 45-28 records.

Also, as the gifts kept on giving, the Minnesota Timberwolves fell victims to the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday, 125-116. The Timberwolves (42-32) now trail the Mavs by three-and-a-half games.

The Mavs play the Timberwolves in Minnesota on Friday night, then will fly back home and host the Jazz on Sunday night.

Commenting on the substantial losses by the Jazz and Timberwolves on his birthday, Kidd said: “We’ll take it. Maybe I need a birthday more often.”

It took a while for the Mavs to blow out the candles on this victory as they got off to a bumpy start and trailed the Rockets, 53-52, at halftime. But Jalen Brunson tallied 16 of his 28 points in the third quarter, prompting the Mavs to tote an 82-72 lead into the final period.

A 15-3 run to open the fourth quarter, capped by a dunk from Dorian Finney-Smith and a three-pointer from Frank Ntilikina, padded the Mavs’ lead to 95-75 with 8:08 remaining in the game. From there, it was garbage time as the Mavs’ lead mushroomed to as high as 26 points against a Rockets’ team that’s the worst in the NBA at 18-55.

“I just wanted to be aggressive,” Brunson said, explaining his scoring surge in the third quarter. “I just got in the paint (and) played with a little bit more pace. I was able to attack gaps and get to the rim.”

The Mavs played without superstar point guard Luka Doncic, who sat out this game while nursing soreness in his right ankle. Spencer Dinwiddie got the start and tallied 19 of his 26 points less than five minutes into the second quarter as he was the spark the Mavs needed after they fell behind, 13-7..

And since the Rockets were still hanging around the Mavs, Finney-Smith decided to give his teammates some choice words in the locker room at halftime.

“(Finney-Smith) is a man of few words, so when he speaks he’s holding a lot of weight to that,” Brunson said. “He basically was just telling us to wake up.

“That team over there is hard-playing and they’re young, so you can’t really look at their record. They’re NBA players, too. They get paid to play basketball, too, so he was just basically telling us to wake up and play together and stick together, and that’s what we did.”

With playoff seedings extremely important, the Mavs knew they could ill-afford to lose a game to a team that already has its ticket stamped to the NBA Draft Lottery. They fell victims to that several weeks ago with they lost consecutive games to Orlando and Oklahoma – two other teams who are also lottery-bound.

Thus, when the second half rolled around, the Mavs started sweeping the floor to the point where they wound up sweeping the season series against the Rockets (4-0) for the first time since the 2011-’12 season when Kidd was still playing for Dallas.

“I thought tonight was one of those games where, Houston is dangerous,” Kidd said. “Against Oklahoma City, we ended up with a loss and we talked about that before the game and how things kind of come back to us, and we’re sitting in the same seat.

“It’s hard to beat a team four times. We accomplished that tonight, but we talked about things that have happened to us. The challenges, the things that we have gotten better at, and this group listened and they executed and we found a way to win.”

The Mavs found a way to win because Dinwiddie set the table in the first half, and Brunson finished things off in the second half.

“If (Brunson is) rolling I’ve got to get out the way,” Dinwiddie said. “I feel like I was kind of reading the game from that standpoint, and obviously for our team, too, it was working.

“We started taking the lead and it started going up, so you don’t need to insert yourself forcefully at that point and time. If we were going down – if we were going in the opposite way – then yeah, I would probably try to choose another route.”

Besides Brunson and Dinwiddie, the Mavs received production from Finney-Smith (14 points, five rebounds), Dwight Powell (13 points, seven rebounds) and Frank Ntilikina (13 points, 21 minutes).

“I thought (Ntilikina) did well yesterday in practice in a sense of his workout, and we looked for it to carry over to tonight,” Kidd said. “I thought he did a great job of picking up the ball.

“We’re not asking a lot from him offensively, but he’s shooting the ball when he’s open and he’s making plays. Again, his length and his defense is something that we try to hold him accountable for and he did a good job for us tonight.”

The Mavs also did a good job defensively, and the Rockets missed 24 of their 28 shots from downtown, and Dallas held rookie Jalen Green to just eight points on 3-of-11 shooting.

“I thought the guys — Reggie (Bullock) — everyone that was on him did what they were supposed to do in the pick-and-roll and also off the ball,” Kidd said. “(We were) just trying to be physical and trying to make him play inside the three-point line, and I thought the guys did a really good job with that.

“Reggie was the primary defender, but with all the switching that they did, there were other guys that were on him. And I thought the guys executed the game plan very well tonight with trying to take away the three.”

In the end, the Mavs were able to survive while Doncic was able to rest his sore right knee. On playing without Doncic, Brunson said: “I think that the roles may change, but the approach and the mentality they stay the same for pretty much all of us. It’s just the next man up mentality.

“I think me and Spencer have been comfortable since he got here. It kind of just flows as soon as he was inserted into the lineup. It was believing we had someone else able to create the way he creates for himself and others. It’s a credit to him for being a great teammate coming in here and just wanting to win.”

As far as celebrating Kidd’s birthday, the players sang happy birthday to him during Wednesday morning’s shootaround. Then, that win over the Rockets was the present Kidd was seeking later that night.

“We’re not scoreboard watching too early,” Kidd said. “We’ve got to take care of ourselves, and if we can do that, one, that accomplishes one goal, and that’s to make it to the playoffs.

“We can’t dictate who we’re going to play. We have to worry about ourselves.”

Twitter: @Dwain Price