By The Associated Press

HOUSTON – With Dirk Nowitzki in another slump and Houston’s Tracy McGrady suddenly struggling after scoring virtually at will, unheralded Dallas point guard Jason Terry rescued the Mavericks from the bleakest of deficits.

Terry scored a season-high 32 points, including a 3-pointer with 26.9 seconds left, and Michael Finley added 18, rallying the Mavericks from a seven-point, fourth-quarter deficit in a 97-93 victory over the Houston Rockets on Saturday.

The victory evened the best-of-seven, first-round series at two games apiece. Game 5 is Monday night in Dallas.

The Mavericks might want to petition the NBA to hold the game elsewhere, because home-court advantage has been a disadvantage in this series. The road team has won all the games in this matchup.

While 14 teams in NBA history have come back from 0-2 deficits – most recently last season when the Lakers beat San Antonio – only two teams have done it in a seven-game series after losing the first two games at home. The 1994 Rockets did it against Phoenix, and the 1969 Lakers against the San Francisco Warriors.

Dallas rallied from two games down against Utah in the first round in 2001, but both losses came on the road.

These Mavericks came to Houston knowing they could win on the road, having won a franchise-best 29 games away from home.

The Mavericks had looked dazed by the intensity of the postseason in the first two games of the series. Other than Nowitzki and Finley, they lacked playoff experience, and were led by rookie coach Avery Johnson, who took over for Don Nelson in the final month of the season.

The Rockets, meanwhile, had the league’s oldest team and a star in McGrady, who was hoping to making it past the first round for the first time in his eight-year career.

It showed.

McGrady averaged 31 points in the first two games and Houston stole the first two games in Dallas.

Then, the Mavericks traveled to Houston, where the Rockets twice squandered leads in the fourth quarter to lose all the momentum they earned away from home.

McGrady led the Rockets with 36 points on 13-of-26 shooting, but came up short down the stretch in Game 4. He had only two points in the fourth quarter, missing all but one of his last five shots.

Wizards 117, Bulls 99

WASHINGTON -The Big Three plus the Poetic One equaled the Washington Wizards’ first playoff victory in 17 years.

Etan Thomas, leading a Washington big-man attack notably absent in the first two games, scored 20 points on 8-for-9 shooting, grabbed nine rebounds, and, along with fellow reserve Michael Ruffin, started a second-half rout with a big third-quarter run in Saturday’s 117-99 victory over the Chicago Bulls.

The win was the first in the postseason for the Wizards since May 8, 1988, when they beat Detroit 106-103 in Game 4 of a first-round series. Of immediate concern for the Wizards is that they cut the Bulls’ series lead to 2-1, with Game 4 in Washington on Monday.

The Big Three of Gilbert Arenas, Larry Hughes and Antawn Jamison played their parts, but the trio that accounted for 66 percent of the scoring in Games 1 and 2 gained inspiration from unsung front court players Thomas, Ruffin and Brendan Haywood.

Arenas finished with 32 points, seven rebounds and seven assists.

Hughes had 21 points and seven rebounds, and Jamison had 21 points and eight rebounds – but Ruffin chipped in a season-high nine points, and Haywood had eight points and nine rebounds.

Tyson Chandler had 15 points and 10 rebounds to lead six players in double figures for the Bulls, who didn’t get the type of heroic game that led them to victories in the first two games. Ben Gordon and Andres Nocioni seemed unstoppable in Game 1, and Kirk Hinrich made nearly everything he shot in Game 2.

The scoring was balanced this time, but a Wizards defense much maligned for its efforts in Chicago rode the emotion of the day and held the Bulls to 39 percent shooting and dominated the last 17 minutes of the game.

Thomas has been known as much for his long dreadlocks and his “More Than an Athlete” book of poems as for his basketball prowess, especially while he was missing the first 32 games of the season with an abdominal injury. He took only five shots and scored nine points in the first two games of the series combined, and his performance Saturday nearly tripled his 7.1-point regular season average.

AP-ES-04-30-05 1756EDT