HOUSTON – Jason Terry obviously welcomed coming off the Dallas Mavericks bench, while too many Rockets seemed to belong on their bench.

Night after night, Houston always seems to bring out the best in the Dallas guard. Terry shot his jersey number Wednesday night at Toyota Center, delivering a game-high 31 points in 34 minutes and sparking the Mavs to a sweep of a three-game road trip with a 96-86 victory over the Rockets.

Winless in four Dallas home appearances, the Mavericks improved to 5-7 and seemed to be buying into the team concept of first-year head coach Rick Carlisle’s new system.

Meanwhile the 7-5 Rockets thoroughly frustrated their coach Rick Adelman on this frigid shooting night and looked quite fragile and uninspired.

Although they cling to a slim NBA Southwest Division lead, the Rockets began to resemble a house of cards in this nationally televised ESPN affair.

Yao Ming wore a beige sport coat and a pair of blue jeans. Tracy McGrady wore a grimace with considerable knee pain. Ron Artest wore a complete look of confusion after resorting to way too much one-on-one activity.

As for Adelman, he shook his head about McGrady’s limited medical allowance of 30 on-court minutes as well as his team’s 37.2 shooting percentage. The Rockets never appeared to be inspired at all on either end of the floor. That flat defensive performance allowed Dallas to shoot 45.5 percent and to outrebound the shorter home team, 46-40.

“We didn’t have good movement and if we did get shots, we didn’t make them,” Adelman said. “We had a bad first half on defense and a bad second half on offense. We just didn’t play well enough to win this game.”

It starts with Yao and his left foot which required extensive off-season surgery to repair a fracture. The foot caused the 7-6 center to wince in pain during Monday night’s game at Oklahoma City. The Rockets want to study the results of a bone scan which was taken on Yao’s foot Tuesday.

How serious is this? Yao will tell you that it’s nothing and he will return in two or three days.

“He just wants to be careful,” said Andy Yao of the Rockets basketball operations staff. “But I’m very scared. It’s the same foot that bothered him last season.”

McGrady’s knee is every bit as fragile as Yao’s foot. T-Mac had 16 points but only one rebound and one assist in 29 minutes. Team doctors limited his playing time to 30 minutes max and it really fouled up any continuity that Adelman could attempt to establish.

“It’s just something we have to live with right now,” the Rockets coach said. “It’s tough on him… tough on our game… and it’s hard for him to come back after we sit him down. I thought we were discombobulated and way out of sync.

“It’s definitely affected him. We’ve just got to find a solution to all of this. You have to flow into stuff. We did it in practice but tonight it was all sporadic.”

McGrady simply is not moving well enough on his left knee. That’s all there is to it. Shane Battier returned to practice with the team on Tuesday but has yet to be activated. The Rockets may have to shelve McGrady for awhile, but they would like for Battier to return before they reach such a decision on McGrady.