<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">DALLAS -- Twenty three seconds in, this smelled like a long Sunday night for the Mavericks. The Heat won the opening tip, worked the ball around and Dwyane Wade lobbed the ball in to Shaquille O'Neal, who scored and drew the foul from DaSagana Diop. So simple. So logical. So unstoppable. So this was how things were going to go. Big night for the Diesel. Great night for the Heat. These NBA Finals seemed headed back to Miami for the next three games with a 1-1 deadlock. And then the most amazing thing happened. As it did for long stretches in the opening loss, the Heat began to ignore its 7-foot-2, 330-pound giant. Incredibly, O'Neal finished with just five points, a career low in 190 playoff games. His previous low had been seven points against Houston in the 2004 first round. The Heat left the American Airlines Center 99-85 losers and in a 2-0 series hole. No team has come back from a 2-0 deficit to win the NBA Finals since Jack Ramsay's Portland Trail Blazers did it 29 years ago. It has subsequently happened six times in best-of-seven playoff series, but nothing we have seen so far would lead you to believe those Blazers are about to step aside. What was the word Wade had used after the Game 1 loss? Yes, "discombobulated" worked just fine on this night as well. Especially when it came to the way the Heat utilized ? or failed to utilize ? its $100 million center. "When you're playing the game, everything is happening so fast," Heat forward Udonis Haslem said. "We've got to figure out a way to get it in there to him." Granted, the Mavs were doubling down on Shaq most times he caught the ball on the low blocks. Often it was fellow 7-footer Dirk Nowitzki coming at him from across the lane. But there's no law that says O'Neal can only handle the ball once per trip. There is such a thing as re-posting, the NBA term for feeding the ball back inside and seeing what happens. All that talk about getting O'Neal more touches in Game 2? So much hot air, as it turned out. He finished 2 for 5 from the field and didn't even play the last 14:49. How does this happen? "I don't know what the situation is," Haslem said. "It's definitely a problem that needs to be taken care of. We've got to have him to beat anybody. He's our main man." As Mavericks guard Devin Harris suggested, "Sometimes he gets lost in the flow of the game." Lost? How do you lose track of a man this huge?</div> Source
