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As far as J.J. Barea is concerned, justice has been served.

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Mavericks guard J.J. Barea joins GAC to give his take on Ron Artest's one-game suspension. Listen

Ron Artest released his frustration in the final minute of the Lakers' Game 2 loss to the Mavericks by smacking Barea in the face. That cost Artest a one-game suspension, and Barea believes the punishment fit the crime.

"I think one game is fine," Barea said during an appearance on ESPN 103.3's Galloway and Company. "The league didn’t like that it was to the face and it was after the play was called. That’s never going to be good with the league. They’re making a point and he was suspended for one game."

The face loved by former Miss Universe Zuleyka Rivera, Barea's girlfriend, is fine.

"I'm doing good," Barea said. "I've been hit harder than that before."

PORTLAND, Ore. – It’s hyperbole to say that nobody believed in the Mavs, but they were probably the most doubted 57-win team in NBA history entering the playoffs.

Portland was a trendy upset pick, in large part due to the Mavs’ troubling trend of premature playoff exits. That recent history combined with the fact the Mavs won only one of their final 10 games against West playoff teams caused many -- and I’m guilty -- of projecting the Mavs to be on vacation by May again.

“Everybody thinks we didn’t have what it takes,” Mark Cuban said. “Everybody was a prognosticator. Everybody was wrong. Our guys just showed a lot of heart, so I’m really proud of them.”

TNT’s Charles Barkley is driving the Mavs’ bandwagon in the second round, having declared that they’ll defeat the two-time defending champion Lakers in six games. That will be a minority opinion.

“Not a lot of people picked us to win this series. Not a lot of people are going to pick us to win the next series,” said Dirk Nowitzki, who has repeatedly referred to the Lakers as heavy favorites to win the West. “We’re just going to go out there and keep competing, play smart and play off each other like we have all season, and we’ll see what happens.”

PORTLAND, Ore. – The Mavs could have advanced to the second round without winning on the road. But they needed a win at the Rose Garden.

They needed a taste of winning on the road, something that’s been routine during the regular seasons but rare during the playoffs for the Mavs recently. Their Game 6 win snapped an eight-game playoff road losing streak for the Mavs, who are now 3-18 away from the American Airlines Center in postseason play since the start of the 2006 NBA Finals.

“Definitely big for confidence to win a road game in the playoffs,” Dirk Nowitzki said. “We hadn’t done it in a while, so we definitely needed one.”

Of course, the Mavs could have avoided the second trip to Portland if they had closed out Game 4. Their performance Thursday night ensured that they wouldn’t be haunted by blowing a 23-point lead during their previous appearance at the Rose Garden.

“I think it’s great for us to close out the series [on the road], especially the way Game 4 ended,” Tyson Chandler said. “It was almost the same way Game 6 was going, but we kept our poise. I think that Game 4 is going to be a huge lesson for us down the road.”

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Rick Carlisle is 2-for-2 in taking his teams to the conference finals. He guided the Detroit Pistons and then the Indiana Pacers to the Eastern Conference finals, but fell short each time of the ultimate goal.

He gets his second shot in three seasons to put the Dallas Mavericks back in the Western Conference finals for the first time since 2006. Carlisle certainly wasn't immune to the skepticism surrounding the Mavs entering this postseason, a belief that this club would not be able to get out of the first round for a second consecutive season.

When asked what it meant to him to defeat the Portland Trail Blazers in six games and advance to play the Los Angeles Lakers, Carlisle put the spotlight on the players.

"I've been around this a long time and my job is to facilitate an opportunity for these guys to win," Carlisle said. "I have grown to love these guys so much and what they stand for and what they've been through over a period of time that extends long before I got here. These are good people and they're great basketball players."

Carlisle got the Mavs to the second round in his first season, but the team's first-round series win in five games over the San Antonio Spurs is largely discounted because Manu Ginobili was injured and didn't play. Carmelo Anthony and the Denver Nuggets went up 3-0 on Dallas in the second round and won the series in five.

For Dallas to get back to the conference finals, it'll have to defeat the two-time champs and do so by winning at least one at the Staples Center where the Mavs lost their only game there this season in a 110-82 unraveling on March 31.

"It's going to be hard," Carlisle said. "They had their stretch of struggles, but they're back on track. Both teams will be rested. We're looking forward to it. We know how good they are, but our team has a strong belief in itself. We know we're going to have to win on the road at some point in the series and we've been a good road team for two years.

"That bodes well, but it doesn't guarantee us anything and we know that."

PORTLAND, Ore. – The Mavs considered Game 6 at the Rose Garden a must-win.

That’s partially because they didn’t want to take any chances in a winner-take-all game against Portland. It’s also because they wanted the best possible chance to beat L.A. in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals.

The Mavs knew before tipoff that the Lakers had closed out the Hornets, meaning Kobe and Co. would get a weekend of rest before the beginning of the second round. That increased the importance of finishing off Portland and preventing 38-year-old Jason Kidd and the rest of the veteran Mavs from further taxing their bodies in the first round.

“This was kind of our Game 7,” Dirk Nowitzki said. “We didn’t want to play again Saturday. Get Kidd a couple of days of rest before we go in a tough environment in L.A. We definitely talked about it before the game, that this was our Game 7, and that’s the way both teams played.”

Nowitzki stressed the importance of trying to steal Game 1 at the Staples Center. He’s absolutely right: Phil Jackson’s teams are 48-0 in series when they win the opener.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Los Angeles Lakers forward Lamar Odom won the award Jason Terry vowed to reclaim. Now the Dallas Mavericks' top reserve has the chance to show who the most valuable sixth man really is in a battle of the benches that includes some juicy subplots.

Odom ran away with Sixth Man of the Year voting after averaging 14.4 points on 53 percent shooting, plus 8.7 rebounds and 3.0 assists. Terry, the 2008-09 winner, finished a distant second after averaging 15.8 points and 4.1 assists.

In the first-round series, Terry averaged 17.3 points in 33.2 minutes -- 21.0 points in the final four games -- to lead a four-man bench that includes point guard J.J. Barea (5.2 ppg, 2.5 apg), forward Peja Stojakovic (9.5) and 7-foot center Brendan Haywood (2.5 ppg, 5.2 rpg). The reserves averaged a heady 34.5 points in the six games and outscored the Portland Trail Blazers' bench 207-125.

"I thought Terry's scoring was absolutely essential to us," Mavs coach Rick Carlisle said. "But, he defended well and his floor game was good."

Odom averaged 12.0 points in six games against the New Orleans Hornets, and despite seeing his playing time drop by more than three minutes from the regular season, his scoring still doubled that of the next closest reserve, guard Shannon Brown (5.8). Phil Jackson has used a four-man bench that averaged 23.7 points against the Hornets -- but is not needed to provide as much scoring boost as the Mavs' bench -- and also includes pesky guard Steve Blake (2.4 ppg, 3.2 apg) and agitating forward Matt Barnes (3.8, both of whom might have a bone to pick with the Jet.

In the last meeting in Los Angeles on March 31, a 110-82 Lakers romp that at the time seemed like a statement victory with the teams on a collision course for the second round, Terry shoved Blake and drew a flagrant foul and was ejected. Barnes then got in Terry's face and was also tossed. Haywood was close to the fray and he got the hook, although it's still not clear what prompted his ejection.

The next day th e incident evolved into an entertaining war of words with Terry going on a national ESPN Radio talk show and unflatteringly referred to the heavily tattooed Barnes as "The Charminator."

"That is a guy who is as soft as Charmin toilet paper," Terry explained.

Barnes then took to his Twitter feed and fired back, reminding folks of the Warriors' first-round upset of the Mavs in 2007: "Me & the Golden St homies laid out the blueprint on how to beat Dallas.. "PUNK'EM" Aint [expletive] changed homey.. So enough w/the small talk"

Aside from the obvious shenanigans that could be coming with some colorful personalities, the more subdued Haywood will play perhaps the most critical bench role outside of Terry. Just as he helped starting center Tyson Chandler keep a fresh, big body on LaMarcus Aldridge, which certainly seemed to grind on the Seagoville product over the six games, Haywood will have to provide solid defense and rebounding against the Lakers' 7-foot front line of forward Pau Gasol and center Andrew Bynum, as well as the 6-10 Odom.

"This team was built on the matchup against the Lakers," Terry said. "Obviously, they're the barometer. They set the bar and we're a team that's the underdog, obviously, in that series. Nobody's going to pick us to win, but it's going to be fun."

To say the least.

PORTLAND, Ore. – Before he had even finished icing his feet in the Rose Garden locker room, Jason Terry’s focus had shifted solely to the Los Angeles Lakers.

In Terry’s mind, closing out the Trail Blazers wasn’t cause for celebration. It was simply the first step toward the Mavs’ goal.

“It’s not much to enjoy,” Terry said after his 22-point, eight-assist performance in Game 6. “It’s one round. Obviously, we’re happy we won, but we’ve got bigger goals and aspirations. Hey, when you’ve got the Lakers coming, you’ve got to really focus and shift your gears and be locked in.”

That was the tone throughout the Mavs’ locker room.

They expected to advance past the first round, although it had happened only once in the previous four seasons. They didn’t waste any energy patting themselves on the back for finishing the first step of what they hope will be a long journey.

“It’s a nice win,” Dirk Nowitzki said after scoring 33 points and grabbing 11 rebounds. “I don’t really want to overrate this win.

“Our goal the last five or six seasons was always a championship. When I first got to the Mavericks, our big goal was making the playoffs. That goal obviously changed. Once you’ve been in the playoffs a number of years, you want to win it all. We understand that to win it all, you’ve got to take the first step, and that’s winning the first round. So we feel good about that, but we know we have a long way to go. Now we’re facing the defending champions, so we have our hands full.”

Added coach Rick Carlisle: “We feel our work has just begun.”

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Terry have shared plenty of postseason heartache and on Thursday night they both finally got to exhale, if only temporarily, and enjoy a playoff moment.

Nowitzki scored a game-high 33 points and had 11 rebounds, and Terry finished with 22 points and a game-high eight assists to steer the Mavs to a first-round series win over the Portland Trail Blazers in six games with a 103-96 victory.

It all almost slipped away in another Blazers fourth-quarter comeback. Portland chipped Dallas' 17-point lead with 1:25 to go in the third quarter to 86-85 with little more than five minutes to left. This time, the Mavs made the plays to pull away late and end the Blazers' season.

The series win is especially significant for the two-man game of Nowitzki and Terry, the lone survivors of the 2006 NBA Finals failure when Dallas blew a 2-0 lead and lost four in a row to the Miami Heat. Since that series, the Mavs have won a single series and even that one is discounted because it came against an injured San Antonio Spurs team in 2009.

Even Mavs fans seemed to be holding their breath, expecting the Mavs to cave and lose the series even though they entered with 57 wins and as the No. 3 seed.

"Jason Terry and Dirk, these guys have been here a long time," third-year coach Rick Carlisle said. "It is so meaningful for them both to help us move on right now. They've both been hearing about it a long time as we all have...We knew it was going to be a brutally hard series, but we also knew it was something we needed. We also knew that we needed to beat them and do it in a way that was in character with a team that deserved to move on. We don't want anything easy and, coincidentally, the next team we're playing is not going to be easy either."

The next team is the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers. Kobe Bryant's club closed out the New Orleans Hornets in six games on Thursday night as well. Despite all the star power, they don't enter the second round series with the same indomitable swagger as the past few seasons. Still, it won't keep the Lakers from being the prohibitive favorite.

The series begins Monday night at Staples night.

"Not a lot of people picked us to win this series and not a lot of people are going to pick us to win the next series," Nowitzki said. "We're just going to go out there and keep competing, play smart and play off each other the way we have all season and we'll just see what happens."

Nowitzki is one of four players to average 25 points and 10 rebounds over his playoff career. He finished this series averaging 27.3 points and 7.8 rebounds. Although his shooting percentage dipped to 45.2 percent after a career-best 51.2 percent during the regular season, he profited from a consistent march to the free throw line.

He made 56-of-63 at the stripe. Terry, who averaged 17.3 points in the series and emerged as the team's decisive second-leading scorer after a slow start, was tied for second on the team with Tyson Chandler in free throw attempts with 20. Gerald Wallace's 12 free throws in Game 6 made him Portland's leader with 32 trips to the line -- 31 fewer free throws than Nowitzki took.

Terry scored 10 points in each of the first two games and then averaged 21.0 over the final four. He finished the series shooting 48.7 percent overall, well above the 37.7 and 38.9 percentages of the past two postseasons. His 3-point average stands at 36.0 percent.

"It feels good," Terry said.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Jet wouldn't be Jet without a little drama.

So, with 2:55 to go and the Portland Trail Blazers trailing just 91-87 in an eerily similar comeback march as the Game 4 debacle, Jason Terry took an inbounds pass near midcourt and promptly dribbled the ball off his hip and into the backcourt for a violation.

Eyes rolled incredulously.

"I'm just thinking about tackling him," Mavs center Tyson Chandler said. "That's my boy, though. You know I love him to death. He came down the stretch for us though. He's the type of player that can make a mistake like that and for some reason or another it gets him fired up."

Terry lucked out a bit, too. On the Blazers' ensuing possession, LaMarcus Aldridge rebounded his own 13-foot jumper and got fouled under the basket. With 2:34 to go and a chance to slice the Mavs' once 17-point lead to two, Aldridge missed both free throws. Shawn Marion made him pay with a pretty bucket and then Terry came down, made a slick move to get by Gerald Wallace and popped in a 14-foot pull-up for a 95-89 lead with 1:42 to play.

Remarkably, Terry committed a near-identical turnover with the score the same and 46.2 seconds to go. This time Wallace missed a 3-pointer, and again the turnover didn't come back to bite him.

"It was unbelievable," Terry said of his late gaffes. "Hey, that's part of adversity. In years past maybe we lose the game because of that turnover."

In years past, the Mavs lost playoff series because they didn't get what Terry provided in this series, which the Mavs closed out with Thursday's tenuous, but effective 103-96 win.

After a slow start offensively, Terry picked it up by averaging 21.0 points in the final four games. Likewise in Game 6, he missed his first four shots but never wavered, finishing with 22 points and 13 in the second half. In the early part of the series, when Terry's shot wasn't falling, coach Rick Carlisle praised him as a facilitator, and he certainly was in Game 6 with eight assists. He also had four rebounds and one turnover before those last two freak ones in 34 minutes.

It was his second consecutive 20-point game and his third in the series. In Games 5 and 6, he provided the complementary scoring to Dirk Nowitzki -- who finished with a game-high 33 points -- that the Mavs so desperately need.

"Tonight the game was in rhythm," Terry said. "I missed my first four shots, coach rolled with me, my teammates kept encouraging me to shoot and make plays and I was able to do so."

He also helped prevent the Brandon Roy magical scoring tour from taking off again in the Rose Garden. Roy hit 4 of 6 shots, but finished with just nine points and three assists in 29 minutes, a far cry from the 40 combined points he dropped in Games 3 and 4, with 24 coming in Game 4.

"Individually, hey, tonight summed it up for me, started out 0-for-4, but stick with it," Terry said. "Defensively, this probably was my best series since I've been a Maverick."

That's what Carlisle was preaching through the first two games when Terry, certainly not known as a defender who will throw anyone off their game, scored just 20 points combined. Carlisle has continually said throughout the series that Terry is playing his best all-around basketball.

"Coach has been challenging me and telling me regardless of what happens on offense, defensively we need you out, alert, really taking ownership in your matchups," Terry said. "They gave me a big assignment guarding Brandon Roy three out of the five games and I thought I held my own."

Terry's all-around contributions certainly came at a clutch time. He's coming off two subpar postseasons and he made no bones about it. Heading into these playoffs, no one was certain what to expect from him after his uneven stretch run that included several bizarre on-court occurrences.

There was the on-court jaw session with J.J. Barea and then an angry Carlisle tossing him out of the timeout huddle and banishing him to the end of the bench for the entire second half. He got hit with a flagrant foul against the Lakers and picked up a mindless technical against the Denver Nuggets. Then, of course, came the strange celebration after his missed free throw with 1.5 seconds to go and the game tied in Houston.

All of this came after an unfortunate death in the family.

So where was Jet's head? After one critical playoff series that soothed the fragile psyche of an entire franchise, the Mavs have a pretty good idea -- and they like it.

"He had a great series," Jason Kidd said. "He was shooting the ball, making plays, finding guys. Defensively, he was great. So now we got to build on it and keep him going."

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Dirk Nowitzki finished with 33 points, his second game of 30 or more in the series. Jason Terry had 22, his second in a row with at least 20. And Jason Kidd, as he has seemingly done on so many occasions, hit another big 3-pointer and made a key steal down the stretch when he wasn't having the best of games.

Each made big plays when it counted most, just as the Mavs were in the process of blowing a 13-point lead heading into the fourth quarter as the Blazers closed to 86-85.

"Tonight, Nowitzki, Kidd and Terry weren't going to let us lose the game. It was simple as that," Mavs coach Rick Carlisle said. "...They made a run in the fourth. We've had teams make runs at us all year, but there wasn't going to be a miracle tonight."

Had the Mavs blown a lead that grew to 17 points with just more than a minute to play in the third quarter two games after suffering one of the three worst losses in the last 57 years of NBA playoff basketball, who knows if they could have recovered a second time in a Game 7.

Carlisle is glad they recovered in time Thursday night at the Rose Garden and don't have to find out.

"A big part of life is acceptance of your situation, whatever it is. And you've got to make the best of whatever is thrown at you and thrown your way. And, hey, I tell you what, I tell you this, walking in this place and playing a playoff game is no fun, brother. This is the loudest place I've ever been and I've been in a lot of places in 27 years, trust me.

"For our guys to hang in and be able to win in this environment is huge for us. To go through what we went through in Game 4, these things happen for a reason. But we feel our work has just begun."

PORTLAND, Ore. -- The Mavericks' 17-point lead with 1:25 to go in the third quarter was down to 86-85 with 5:28 left in the game. What would transpire in those final minutes of Thursday's Game 6 would either send the Mavs on to the second round or set them up for another round of well-earned bashing.

With their 23-point collapse in Game 4 still fresh, Dallas went on an 11-4 run to put the game away, getting four huge baskets down the stretch. Jason Kidd started it with a corner 3-pointer to push the lead back up to four, at 89-85. He came right back and stripped LaMarcus Aldridge in the paint and got the ball to Jason Terry, who buried a jumper for a 91-85 lead with 4:04 to go.

Shawn Marion then went to work on Brandon Roy, methodically backing him down in the paint, then turning and flipping it in from five feet for a 93-87 advantage with 2:13 to go.

After the Blazers cut the deficit to four, it was back to Terry. He put a move on Gerald Wallace, got free and pulled up for a 14-footer that went down for a 95-89 margin with 1:42 left.

Portland was left to foul the rest of the way, and Dirk Nowitzki salted it away with eight consecutive free throws.

"The Jason Kidd 3 really to me was the big shot of the game," Nowitzki said. "I thought everybody contributed in a nice way tonight for a big road win."

Nowitzki contributed 14 points in the fourth quarter, but one of his bigger plays might have been a block on Nicolas Batum under the basket with about 10 minutes to play. J.J. Barea contributed a runner and a big 3-pointer to extend the lead to nine as the teams traded buckets during a wild stretch of the fourth quarter.

"The block was a big play there when they had a little momentum, but we all -- at some point in the fourth quarter -- somebody came up with a big play for us," Nowitzki said. "That's what you have to do to win a tough game on the road. Everybody at some point has a big block or just a big box out or a big bucket on the other end."

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Jason Kidd knocked it down this time.

His clutch 3-pointer was from almost the exact spot as the one he bricked during the Mavs’ Game 4 meltdown. The situation was eerily similar, too. As was the case in the fourth quarter of the Mavs’ previous trip to the Rose Garden, the Trail Blazers had rallied from a double-digit deficit to pull within one possession when Kidd got a wide-open look from the left wing.

Kidd wasn’t about to make the same mistake he did days earlier, when he missed so badly that the ball thudded off the backboard on the opposite side of the hoop. This one ripped the net, giving the Mavs a bit of breathing room in a game they pulled away to win to end the series.

“I rushed it in Game 4,” Kidd said. “I had plenty of time to shoot it. I got a little excited. I thought if the ball came to me, just to relax and take my time. That’s what I did.”

It was the only shot Kidd made during the fourth quarter, coming after the Blazers slashed a 17-point lead to one with a little more than five minutes remaining. Portland never made it a one-possession game again.

“The Jason Kidd 3 really to me was the big shot of the game,” Dirk Nowitzki said.

How it happened: The Dallas Mavericks managed to finish the job this time. Man, they made it interesting, though.

There was a definite déjà vu feeling in the fourth quarter when the Portland Trail Blazers sliced a Dallas lead that had swelled to 17 during the third quarter down to one point. It felt an awful lot like Game 4, when Portland rallied from 23 points down to stun the Mavs.

But the Mavs never lost the lead. They finished off the series by knocking down clutch free throws to snap an eight-game playoff road losing streak.

The Mavs built the big lead on the backs of Dirk Nowitzki (33 points, 11 rebounds) and Jason Terry (22 points, eight assists), the only two players from the 2006 NBA Finals team that remain on the Dallas roster. Nowitzki came through as the Mavs’ closer with 13 points in the fourth, the third time this series he’s scored at least that many points in the final frame.

What it means: Bring on the Los Angeles Lakers. The Mavs move on to the second round for only the second time since their 2006 run to the NBA Finals. They earned a weekend of rest before traveling to Los Angeles for Monday’s Game 1 at Staples Center.

Play of the game: Dirk Nowitzki drove hard to the basket, took contact from Blazers backup big man Chris Johnson and finished a lefty layup for an and-1. He celebrated the basket with a holler that offended Johnson, the D-League defensive player of the year. Johnson raked his hand across Nowitzki’s face after a rebound on the ensuing possession, drawing a flagrant foul. This sparked a 13-2 run that erased Portland’s 11-point lead. Nowitzki had the first nine points in the spurt.

Stat of the night: Jason Terry scored at least 20 points in three of the last four games of the series. He had a total of four 20-point games in the Mavs’ previous four playoff series.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Dirk Nowitzki didn't score in the third quarter and it didn't matter. Jason Terry kept the momentum flowing in the Mavs' favor with eight points in the third. Dallas leads, 75-62, and is 12 minutes away from advancing to a second-round matchup against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Nowitzki still leads the team with 19 points, and Terry has 18. Shawn Marion added six points in the quarter and has 14 for the game.

Dallas led by as many as 17 points. Portland made one run to get within 59-52, but Andre Miller missed a technical free throw on a defensive three second violation and then made 1 of 2 free throws after a foul. Jason Terry then hit a jumper, Tyson Chandler got a putback and Jason Kidd hit a remarkable high-archer at the buzzer for a 65-52 lead.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Gerald Wallace made his way to the court a few minutes after his teammates and will play in the second half. Wallace, who had 13 points in the first quarter, didn't play in the second quarter because of lower back stiffness.

His return was initially in doubt.

The Blazers led 27-19 after the first quarter, but trailed 52-43 at the half.