The Dallas Mavericks recently visited the Staples Center for a game against the Los Angeles Clippers, one that the Mavs won 93-84. Drew Gooden was in street clothes for the game, sidelined with a rib injury, which meant that he wasn’t as readily able to tune out hecklers as a player in the game would. And here we go.

(Not quite BFFs.)

Two partisan Clippers fans taunted Gooden and the rest of the Mavericks over the course of the night, using the old tried-and-true method of seeing a detail about someone and then yelling about it. “Dirk Nowitzki has a fake tan,” etc. etc., at a high volume. Apparently, either Gooden or an acquaintance allegedly pointed the two fans out after the game and called them “faggots.” Alert the presses? One of the fans, an actor with one memorable TV appearance, doesn’t mind if he does.

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When you wake up on Monday morning and see yourself all over the Internets looking like this, you know it’s not going to be a good week. Popeye Jones, who played for the Mavericks over two stints from 1993 to 2003, and is now an assistant coach with the team, was arrested and charged with DUI on Sunday.

Jones, it was reported, refused a breathalyzer test and “resisted arrest” before being taken into custody. But Richardson, Texas police say that his resisting was so full of Fail that they’re not even going to charge him with that. Apparently losing one’s balance and hitting the pavement face first is punishment enough. Read more…

Lakers gacked against the Mavericks last night, not that anyone will remember the game result in a few weeks.

But Shannon Brown, for the second time already this season, did give us a reason to mark Halloween Eve, 2009. Read more…

Quick: who’s #4 on the Utah Jazz’s all-time list of most games played? It goes John Stockton, Kark Malone, Mark Eaton, and… well, you probably already read the headline and figured it out. It’s one of the largest, slowest players in NBA history: the one, the only Greg Ostertag!

(Awww, why are the glacial white guys playing against each other? They should be teaming up! When are we going to stop doing this to each other?)

We bring him up not because we merely like celebrating the dinosaurs of the league - though we do enjoy that - but because the Ostertag Era may not be over just yet. Despite not having played in years (and not having been especially productive while actually playing), Ostertag’s got his eyes on a comeback, right in his native land of Texas.

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One of the stranger aspects of the Dirk Nowitzki/Cristal Taylor saga - aside from the fact that she was engaged to an NBA player until he ran a background check on her and found more red flags than Tienanmen Square - has been the media’s willingness to accept her claims, even as she’s being held on suspicion of fraud.

(Smile, Dirk! But not like that, please. Never like that.)

So when, for example, Taylor claimed to be pregnant, there were plenty of tuts and moans to go around when Nowitzki essentially washed his hands of her. See the POST, HUFFINGTON, for example. The actual foolish behavior, though, would be having taken Taylor at her word.

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You remember Cristal Taylor — Dirk Nowitzki’s ex-fiance, who says that she’s pregnant with his child — yeah, that one. She was sentenced to five years in prison this morning in a court in St. Charles, Missouri, on a 12-year-old forgery and theft case.

It’s never a good sign in a relationship when the man you want to marry (allegedly) hires investigators and turns you in, having you arrested in his own house. That happened in May, and now the 38-year-old St. Louis-area native is going to the Graybar Hotel for a number of transgressions, mostly forgery and writing bad checks.

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It’s been well-known that Mark Cuban is an unconventional owner whose fandom and fervency borders on obsessive. That’s fine, and a welcome respite from the Donald Sterlings of professional sports, but it becomes problematic when he finds himself rewriting the record books on fines levied by the league.

(And now there’s so many new layers of poetic justice in this.)

It also appears that the enmity that sometimes boils over has also targeted former Mavs coach (and current Warriors head honcho) Don Nelson. At stake is deferred compensation that Cuban, well, just isn’t going to pay, judges’ rulings be damned.

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The great thing about Mark Cuban is that the fun doesn’t end when the NBA season does. A great philosopher — I think it was Spider-Man — once said that with great power comes great responsibility. Also plenty of litigation, apparently. Cuban no sooner extricated himself from one legal entanglement on Friday, than he got caught up in another.

And this time, Cuban is being sued by a company owned by H. Ross Perot, Jr., son of former Presidential candidate and noted screwball H. Ross Perot. Which is always fun. Cuban is accused of diverting millions of dollars from the Mavericks’ arena, American Airlines Center, to make up for team financial shortfalls. Read more…

Like many control freaks who are in the public eye, Mark Cuban often gets frustrated with bloggers. What’s he supposed to do when they put out scurrilous rumors about the Mavericks, or post unflattering images of him alongside discredited 1950s politicians? Mr. Cuban figures, as one would probably guess, that a blacklist would be a good thing.

And who to administer this list? Why ESPN of course. Cuban’s modest proposal is that the WWL should present a page of blogs and websites which they won’t use in their reporting. But wouldn’t such a list just give these sites the publicity that Cuban says they don’t deserve? He has an answer for that, too. Read more…

• Meet Maria Verchenova, the swinging Russian sweetie who hopes to do in golf what fellow countrywoman Maria Sharapova has done in tennis.

• Glen “Big Baby” Davis makes Magic fans cry by hitting a game-winning shot - then bowls over a young courtside spectator. Of course, the kid’s dad isn’t very happy with the Raging Luna-Celtic.

• A Baltimore-area stripper claims that there’s nothing Michael Phelps likes better than sex & spitting tobacco.

• That Nuggets-Mavericks series certainly was a fierce one. If it wasn’t Mark Cuban getting into it with Kenyon Martin’s mom, it was Carmelo Anthony’s fiancee LaLa Vasquez jawing with Dallas fans.

• But Dirk Nowitzki steered clear of any such confrontations, since he had his own problems with his own fraudulent fiancee. Hey, Dirk - Tony Banks feels your pain.

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