Hornets open 3-game road trip today

• By LES EAST
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Jan 14, 2009 - UPDATED: 6:48 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — The Hornets face a challenging three-game road trip that begins in Dallas at 7:30 p.m. today.

Perhaps they were too focused on this trip, which extends to Cleveland on Friday and Detroit on Saturday, before trying to finish business at home in a 101-95 loss to the previously 13-22 Knicks on Monday night.

“Maybe we were looking forward to the next game instead of thinking about this game,” New Orleans coach Byron Scott said.

“Sometimes you have to trick yourself into thinking you’re playing the Lakers or the Celtics.

“We looked at the Knicks and saw a team that had won 13 games. Now they have another one on their belt. Great teams in this league don’t do that. I don’t consider us a great team. We’ve got a good team. We’ve got a very good team when we want to be.”

Scott alluded to two other losses to teams with losing records — Charlotte and Sacramento — earlier in the season. He said in all three cases the Hornets lost because a less-talented team played with greater energy and intensity than they did.

“I’m pretty sick of it,” he said. “I’m pretty sick of having to conjure up energy talking about energy. We should never even be talking about playing hard. That should be the last thing we talk about.

“We’re going to keep every couple of weeks getting our butt kicked by somebody that shouldn’t beat us because we haven’t learned our lesson yet. Or maybe we will learn it. I hope it’s sometime this year, though.”

Scott said the Hornets usually don’t have any energy or intensity shortcomings when they play the better teams, which will be the case throughout this trip.

“We’ll see what we’re made of the next three games,” he said. “We play with that same effort, the same intensity (as against the Knicks), none of these next three will be a close game.”

This is the first meeting between the Hornets and the Mavericks (22-15) since New Orleans beat Dallas, 4-1, in a first-round playoff series last April.

The Southwest Division rivals are both in the thick of another tight divisional race. Last season New Orleans won the division in a tiebreaker against San Antonio and the Rockets and Mavericks finished one and five games back, respectively, as all four won more than 50 games.

Going into Tuesday’s games, the Hornets were a game behind the Spurs, a half-game ahead of the Rockets, and 1‰ ahead of Dallas.