The game wasn't competitive, score-wise. And on this night, Houston completed a 4-0 season sweep of Dallas.
Both the Mavericks and Rockets still had some fight left in them, at least verbally, and it spilled into the American Airlines Center hallways following Houston's 123-107 victory Tuesday night.
Rockets swingman Trevor Ariza, upset with Mavericks center Salah Mejri, waited as close as security guards would allow him to the back door of the Mavericks' locker room. Meanwhile, Mavericks security had to calm down a visibly agitated Mejri, who seemed hell-bent on confronting Ariza.
The potential showdown was diffused when security accompanied Mejri straight to the players' underground parking lot, away from the hallway where Ariza waited. Ariza then joined Rockets teammates and coaches on the team bus.
Those were just some of the parting tensions on a night in which eight technical fouls and two flagrant-foul-1s were called. Injured Rockets guard Patrick Beverley, sitting on a golf cart in the AAC hallway, heckled Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle as Carlisle left his postgame news conference.
"Don't get mad at us for just playing basketball, brother!" Beverley hollered down the hallway as Carlisle walked away, never turning. "Good luck the rest of the season, brother!" Beverley added.
"I don't know what they was on tonight," Rockets guard James Harden said of the Mavericks. "That other team was trippin' tonight, just disrespectful, unprofessional, players and coaches. I don't know what was their problem, but I think that got us going.
"They wanted to throw a little cheap shot and just woke us up a little bit, and it was over from there."
The game was tied at 31-31 after one quarter, but by halftime it was 66-47, and after three quarters it was 98-74.
"I don't know what it was. It wasn't even basketball," Mavericks guard Wes Matthews said of the chippy play. "Tempers. Two in-state teams. We play each other four times. We've had two-and-a-half close games, had battles in the past.
"It is what it is. But we've got to be better than that. It was an opportunity for us to channel [the feistiness] into basketball. And we didn't do that."
Houston completed its first sweep of the Mavericks since the 1997-98 season. That one also was a 4-0 sweep.
The one-sidedness of Tuesday's game was predictable in that the Rockets brought in a 23-9 record, compared to Dallas' 9-22.
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