OAKLAND, Calif. – Never have I been this wrong.

Sure, there was the vote for John Anderson in my first presidential election. And who in the world thought putting water in a bottle and selling it for a premium price would ever work?

But have I ever been this wrong about a sports team?

Never. Not even close.

I thought the Mavericks were special.

It turns out they were tragically flawed.

I thought this team had what it took to win the title.

It turns out they couldn't even hang with a No. 8 seed when its best player was hopping around on one leg.

The Mavericks have been exposed as pretenders. The ramifications of this will stretch into what should be an active off-season.

This is not a knee-jerk reaction. Go back to the NBA Finals, when the Mavericks held a 13-point fourth quarter lead and were minutes away from a 3-0 lead Miami would not have been able to overcome.

The Mavericks have lost eight of 10 playoff games since that moment. They weren't competitive in three of them.

How do you keep that nucleus together going forward? How do you sell yourself – and your fans – that next season will be different?

You can't. That's why owner Mark Cuban and coach Avery Johnson have some difficult decisions ahead.

This is not an elite team. Elite teams aren't humiliated in the first round. A team that has touted its mental toughness all season doesn't crack at the first sign of adversity.

The Mavericks entered these playoffs as if a return to the Finals was their inalienable right. Sure, they worked hard. But there is more to winning a title than hard work.

Golden State did the Mavericks a favor. Say this team had advanced to the Western Conference finals as everyone expected it to do. If the Mavericks had lost in the conference finals, Cuban and Johnson could have rationalized the defeat. Losing to San Antonio or Phoenix is no disgrace.

But no one can rationalize a loss to the Warriors in the first round. No one can say all this team needs is a little more time together.

This team has had time together. We've seen what it can do. It's not enough for a championship.

In the hours leading up to Thursday's colossal flop, Johnson used the word weird to describe his team.

Weird is not the word that leaps to mind in the wake of this 25-point loss.

Dismal. That's one word. Dreadful is another.

You can go down the alphabet from there.

The loss isn't a mortal blow to Dirk Nowitzki's stature in this league but it's close. He deserves the blame and criticism that will be hurled his way. But he wasn't alone in this epic meltdown.

Jason Terry didn't distinguish himself. Josh Howard played well in the first five games but not in Game 6.

The Mavericks three best players combined to shoot 34.7 percent from the field and turned the ball over 10 times in the most important game of the season.

Nowitzki had one good game in the series. Terry had one good game. Otherwise, the two players the Mavericks rely on to step up night in and night out didn't.

Is it a case or bad timing, or a case of the team's top players not having the temperament or mentality to handle the pressure that goes with being No. 1?

Remember how much excitement and good will the Mavericks generated with their playoff run last season? That makes what they did this season all the more crushing. A city gave its trust, its hopes to the Mavericks and this is how they repaid them.

Fans don't get over that sort of abuse quickly.

I'm not wrong about that.