Washington, DC—

It appears that if the Wizards seem to have most of the pieces of the puzzle ready for the upcoming season, but they just could not finish it tonight against a strong Mavericks team who has also improved in the offseason.

The Wizards were led by Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison, both with 19 points, but it was the 6 for 6 effort by Gilbert Arenas in the third quarter that had the fans thinking this might be the year even though Gilbert has refused to talk to the media until the NBA tells him he has to.

"You know, Gil likes to play mind games," Wizards guard DeShawn Stevenson said. "But you can see, when he's attacking and stuff, it's hard to guard him. So we just need more of that before the regular season comes, him being aggressive."

For the Mavericks it their first chance to see what Shawn Marion could for this team. He proved that he was going to do a lot, scoring 26 points on 11-of-15 shooting in his Dallas debut after sitting out the preseason opener with a calf injury.

Despite the victory for the Mavs, Head Coach Rick Carlise said there is still a bit of work to be done before this team faces the Wizards on opening night October 27^th.

“I thought defensively we made some mistakes in the first half…and we have to remedy those because this is going to be an opportunist team.  I didn’t think we did a good job with our shooters early, but we adjusted and it all worked out.  We had some good things happen, but we have a lot of work to do,” said Carlise.

The only bad note for the Wizards came at the 2:30 mark of the first quarter when center Brendan Haywood clutched his right ankle and appeared to be in lot of pain as he stood. Haywood stayed in for another 5 1/2 minutes before leaving. The team expects Haywood to be day to day and possibly to sit out the next game against Toronto, but injury should not affect his start in the season opener.