NBA

Deron’s big second half ignites Nets over Mavericks

DALLAS — Deron Williams called last night’s game against his hometown team — the one that he passed up the chance to play for last summer — “just another game.”

He sure didn’t play like it.

After a relatively quiet first half, Williams woke up after intermission, scoring 26 points in the second half to finish with 31 to go along with six assists and leading the Nets to a 113-96 victory over the Mavericks in front of a sellout crowd of 19,962 inside American Airlines Center.

The win moved the Nets (40-28) to 2-0 on their eight-game, 17-day Circus Trip with a win that kept them within one game of the Knicks for the Atlantic Division lead.

“I kept telling him I would get him out a minute or two in the second half,” Nets interim coach P.J. Carlesimo said. “And he goes, ‘Are you watching what’s going on out here?’

“So, obviously, we didn’t take him out until the end.”

Brook Lopez had a season-high 38 points and 10 rebounds, but the night was all about Williams, who made his first appearance in his hometown since choosing to remain a Net instead of returning home to play alongside Dirk Nowitzki for the Mavericks. And on a night where Nowitzki was also on, going 8-for-10 and finishing with 16 points, Williams showed the local fans what could have been.

The point guard continued his renaissance since the All-Star break, taking over the game in the second half. After scoring 13 points in the third quarter, Williams poured in 10 of the team’s first 12 in the fourth — including a fadeaway jumper to put the Nets up 97-88 that forced Dallas to call timeout and sent Williams racing back upcourt with a huge grin on his face.

“When you’re feeling good and you feel like you can’t miss, it’s a good feeling,” he said. “I looked over at my bench and saw the excitement [on their faces].”

Williams was introduced to a smattering of boos before the game, but certainly wasn’t met with the hostile reception he anticipated after he chose to return to the Nets for five years and nearly $100 million guaranteed instead of coming home.

“It wasn’t bad,” Williams said. “I thought there’d be more boos. But it wasn’t bad.

“I think I had a lot of people there, so most of the cheers were them.”

Since Williams made his decision, Mark Cuban — the always-opinionated Mavericks owner — hasn’t been hesitant to say he’s comfortable with the team he has both now and in the future, preaching the financial flexibility the Mavericks have maintained under the new collective bargaining agreement.

But he wasn’t going anywhere near the topic of Williams when he spoke to reporters while working out before last night’s game.

“I’m not going into Deron,” Cuban said. “That’s old, old, old, old news.”

Though Cuban wasn’t interested in discussing Williams, he had no problem talking about the fact he disagrees with the way the Nets have gone about building their roster, going well over the luxury tax — and the roster restrictions that come with doing so — in order to put this season’s team together.

“Yes,” Cuban said when asked if being capped out, like the Nets are, is a tough position for a team to be in moving forward. “That’s the position we didn’t want to be in.”

The Nets were good enough to beat Cuban’s Mavericks last night, thanks in large part to the combination of Williams beating Dallas from the outside and Lopez destroying the Mavericks inside. Lopez had 15 points in the first quarter and didn’t slow down from there, finishing 15-for-22 from the field as he did whatever he wanted in the paint.

The combination added up to a crucial win for the Nets, who will get two days to rest in Los Angeles before facing the Clippers on Saturday night.

“This was a big win for us,” Williams said. “In my hometown or not, this was a big win no matter what. … Hopefully this is the team we can see for the rest of the season, because this team will be hard to beat.”

tbontemps@nypost.com