The Book of Basketball (69 page)

37. DIRK NOWITZKI

Resume: 11 years, 9 quality, 8 All-Stars … ’07 MVP … top 5 (’05, 06, ’07, ’09), top 10 (’02, ’03), top 15 (’04, ’08) … 3-year peak: 26–9–4 (51%-89%-41%) … best player on runner-up (’06 Mavs), 27–12–3 (23 G) … 2007 averages: 25–9–3, 50% FG, 42% 3FG, 90% FT … 9 straight 22–8 seasons

The NBA’s alpha dog almost ended up being German. Yup, we came
that
close in the 2006 Playoffs—if not for the heroics of Wade, Salvatore, Pay-ton and others, Germany would have made its biggest advancement on American culture since David Hasselhoff infiltrated the horny brains of teenage guys with
Baywatch.
Personally, I was terrified—this was the same country that started two world wars and deliberately injured Pele in
Victory.
Had Nowitzki grabbed the conch that spring, maybe Germany would have gotten its swagger back, maybe the bad blood would have gotten going again and maybe our lives would have eventually been in danger. Instead the Mavs fell apart in the Finals and so did Dirk, who secured his spot on the “Crap, It’s Just Not in Me” All-Stars along with Karl Malone, Drexler, KJ, Ewing and Sampson. How close did we come? Hop into the NBA Time Machine with me; we’re heading back to 2006. Dirk had just completed his finest regular season and made a run at becoming the toughest NBA player in the history of Europe.
¹⁰⁹
(Note: Dirk developed such a nasty streak that even when Ashton Kutcher punk’d him, it seemed like Dirk wanted to kick Ashton’s ass for a few seconds, which
would have been the greatest and most random fight ever—but that’s a whole other story.) Although we liked following a cocky, snarling 7-foot German with a 25-foot range during a sublimely efficient offensive season, questions lingered about his crunch-time prowess and Dallas’ title prospects when its best player seemed soft and couldn’t guard anyone.
¹¹⁰
After all, nobody ever won a title with an all-offense, no-defense guy leading the way. Then Dirk broke through with the following moments:

• Game 7, San Antonio series (Round 2).
  Playing on the road against the champs, trailing by three in the final 20 seconds and still reeling from a gut-wrenching three by Ginobili on the previous possession, Dallas calls the season-deciding play for Dirk. He gets the ball and backs Bruce Bowen into the paint with a herky-jerky, grind-you-backward move developed the previous summer. With Bowen overplaying him, Dirk weasels past him and somehow avoids getting tripped, kicked, or punched in the balls. Then he barrels toward the basket, absorbs the contact from Ginobili,
  ¹¹¹
  finishes a twisting layup, draws the foul
  and
  buries the free throw. Tie game! Remember, the Mavs were 20 seconds away from blowing a three-games-to-one series lead and a 20-point lead in Game 7; they never would have been the same after that. Considering the circumstances, shouldn’t that play rank with Magic’s sky hook against the ’87 Celtics, Bird’s steal-and-pass against the ’87 Pistons, MJ’s basket-steal-basket sequence to end the ’98 Finals, Jerry West’s half-court bomb to extend Game 3 of the ’70 Finals and every other “I need to come up big
  Right Now”
  clutch play in NBA history? And since they ended up winning in OT and eventually made the Finals, another question has to be asked: how many superstars single-handedly altered the course of the playoffs with one play? At this specific point in time, it sure seemed like Dirk was making a leap from franchise guy to potential Pantheon guy.
  ¹¹²
  

• Game 5, Phoenix Series (Western Finals).
  Dirk torches Phoenix with one of the best performances of the decade: 50 points, 12 rebounds and an unforgettable “there’s no effing way we’re losing” explosion in the second half (scoring 24 of 34 Dallas points to ice it). I remember being delighted that he made the necessary fundamental and philosophical changes to become dominant, realized it wasn’t okay to bitch out teammates, found a way to punish smaller defenders and unveiled a swagger that his team desperately needed. Could anyone guard him? Opponents couldn’t use taller Duncan/Garnett types because Dirk was beating those guys off the dribble or even worse, pulling them 25 feet away and shooting threes over them. The gritty Bowen/Raja types had no chance because of his creative high-post game (fueled by his deadly fall-away). Who was left? Lankier forwards like Shawn Marion had the best chance on paper because they could stay in front of him, make him work for his points and force him to settle for 16-footers,
  ¹¹³
  but Dirk learned to adjust when his shot wasn’t falling, adopting Larry Bird’s ploy of crashing the offensive boards and getting his points on putbacks and foul shots. So he was always going to affect a game offensively. At this specific point in time, with his confidence swelling, there wasn’t a way to fully shut him down. Here’s what I wrote: “Dirk is playing at a higher level than any forward since Bird…. He’s been a killer all spring, a true assassin, and I certainly never imagined writing that about Dirk Nowitzki.”
  

To bang my point home that Nowitzki was better than anyone realized, I created something in that same column called the 42 Club. I was especially fond of the idea because of its simplicity. I added up the point, rebound, and assist averages for franchise guys during the playoffs, and if the number topped 42, that meant we were probably talking about a potential
Level 4 (or higher) guy.
¹¹⁴
To figure out the members, I allowed only guys who played 13 or more playoff games in one postseason, since that’s a legitimate sampling (more than a month of basketball at the highest level). Here were the 42 Club members from 1977 to 2008 (so we can include LeBron):

Michael Jordan (6x): 49.4 (’89); 50.7 (’90); 45.9 (’91); 46.5 (’92); 47.8

(’93); 43.8 (’97) Shaquille O’Neal (4x): 43.6 (’98); 49.2 (’00); 49.0 (’01); 43.9 (’02)

Larry Bird (4x): 42.0 (’81); 44.4 (’84); 43.4 (’86); 44.2 (’87)
¹¹⁵

Moses Malone (2x): 43.0 (’81), 43.3 (’83)

Magic Johnson (2x): 43.8 (’86), 42.5 (’91)

Karl Malone (2x): 43.0 (’92), 42.9 (’94)

Hakeem Olajuwon (2x): 44.2 (’94), 47.8 (’95)

Tim Duncan (2x): 42.7 (’01), 45.4 (’03)

LeBron James (2x): 44.7 (’06), 43.6 (’08)

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1x): 47.1 (’80)

Charles Barkley (1x): 44.5 (’93)

Kobe Bryant (1x): 42.8 (’01)

Allen Iverson (1x): 43.7 (’01)

Kevin Garnett (1x): 44.0 (’04)

Dirk Nowitzki (1x): 45.1 (’06 pre-finals)

There wasn’t a single fraud on that list with the possible exception of … well, I’m trying to be nice, but fuck it—Karl Malone! Every other memorable spring from 1977 to 2008 is represented except for Walton in ’77 (didn’t score enough points), Bernard in ’84 (only played 12 games), Magic in ’87 and ’88 (barely missed), and Wade in ’06 (didn’t heat up until the last two rounds). Just like in real life, the best playoff seasons of Ewing,
Robinson, and Drexler fell a tad short. Career-year/MVP seasons for KG, Barkley, and Iverson all qualified, as did Kobe’s ridiculous ’01 season when he quietly peaked as an all-around player. I also like that our most dominant player (MJ) leads with six appearances, and his precocious next-generation challenger (LeBron) cracked the 42 Club at the tender age of twenty-one. Everything about the concept checks out; there are no flukes, no aberrations, no injustices. It just works. I’d never imagined that Dirk could potentially crack a list of elite playoff performers; just two summers before, I’d skewered Dallas for refusing to part with Nowitzki in a Shaq trade. The 50-point game altered my opinion. As I wrote the next day, “He’s the most unstoppable player in basketball, a true franchise guy, and I think he’s headed for his first championship in about two weeks.”

So what happened? Dallas won the first two Finals games, carried a 13-point lead into the final six minutes of Game 3 in Miami … and collapsed faster than a Corey Haim acting comeback. Wade took over, the refs took over and the Mavs lost their composure. Even after Miami’s big comeback, Nowitzki (a 90.1 percent FT shooter that season) had a chance to tie the game with two freebies in the final three seconds. He clanked the first one. Ballgame. So much for making the leap. Dallas pulled a bigger no-show in Game 4 than Corey Haim in
Fever Lake
, then rallied in Game 5 before getting screwed by more dubulent
¹¹⁶
officiating, although they did commit a number of brain farts down the stretch and Josh Howard missed two key free throws in overtime. By Game 6, they were more rattled than Corey Haim watching the coke scenes in
Scarface.
In retrospect, Miami deserved to win for being a tougher, more experienced team. Dallas got tight down the stretch; Miami stayed cool. Dallas complained for two straight weeks; Miami didn’t complain about anything. Avery Johnson looked tighter than a whipped husband afraid to get a lap dance at someone else’s bachelor party; Pat Riley always looked like he was getting ready for a postgame bottle of chardonnay on his boat. Even the body language of the two stars was different: Wade was cooler than cool, but Nowitzki was constantly frowning, yanking his mouthpiece out and acting more bitchy than Corey Haim
when he was banned from the
Lost Boys 2
shoot.
¹¹⁷
Let the record show that Dirk sucked in all four of those losses while his teammates imploded around him. And in an amazing wrinkle for 42 Club purposes, Dirk finished the ’06 Playoffs with …

(Drumroll, please…)

A 41.6!

See? The formula never fails. The following season, Dirk stumbled into an MVP Award that was invalidated by the great Golden State Collapse of ’07. Now he’s hitting the latter half of his career and we can safely say that Dirk Nowitzki missed the boat as an alpha dog. Sure, he’s one of the best forty players ever. But he was never the dominant guy for an entire season, and as far as I’m concerned, America is safe.

1.
Trading for an NBA player with baggage is like dating a girl with baggage: you might be happy for a few months, but 19 out of 20 times, it will end badly. (And I mean
badly
, as in, “Why does it hurt when I pee?” or “I wonder who left 59 hang-ups on my answering machine?”) The McAdoo/Lakers trade was the 20th time.

2.
We’ve all played hoops with someone who had McAdoo’s jumper and we envied the guy for it. For me, it was my buddy House. When you have McAdoo’s jumper, it’s like being the one kid in high school who has a donkey dick. Everyone will remember you.

3.
Pistons GM Jack McCloskey explained the release like this: “He could have given us 10 to 12 minutes a game. He said that he didn’t want to play part-time because it would drive the value of his next contract down. Prior to that, I might have been the only guy in Detroit who thought Bob McAdoo was really injured, but after he said that, I lost all respect.”

4.
The complete list: McAdoo, Haywood, Thompson, John Lucas, Sidney Wicks, Pete Maravich, Robert Parish (G-State version), George McGinnis, Truck Robinson, Terry Furlow, Marvin Barnes, John Drew, Bernard King, Micheal Ray Richardson and yes … Kareem.

5.
Another pioneer move by Doo: after his NBA career ended in ’86, he starred in Italy, playing another 7 years and averaging a 27–9 over there. When my friend Wildes recently moved from Manhattan (the NBA of hooking up) to West Hartford (the Italian League), I predicted he’d put up inflated numbers and started calling him Euro McAdoo. Then he quickly found a girlfriend. I think I put too much pressure on him.

6.
He’s a charter member of the Tony La Russa All-Stars for Guys Who Have Looked the Same for So Long That It’s Almost Creepy.

7.
FYI: if you’re flicking channels, come across
Vice
, and see a skinny Johnson with short hair, you’re in for a classic episode.

8.
Parish played there from 1977 to 1980 and had a reputation for mailing it in and being a pothead; that’s how he became available in the McHale/Parish-for-Joe Barry Carroll hijacking. Also, Chief was arrested during the ’91 season for having a giant package of pot FedExed to his house. Did this affect his Pyramid ranking? Absolutely. I moved him up a few spots.

9.
Only twice have I been part of a crowd that loathed an opponent to that degree—this game and Game 6 of the ’86 Finals, right after Ralph Sampson picked a fight with Jerry Sichting, when we caused his backbone to crumble as the game went along—and it’s an experience unlike anything else in sports. To be honest, it’s a little scary. Like being at a Jerry Springer taping with fifteen thousand people.

10.
This includes referee Jack Madden, who stood under the basket watching the whole thing and never called a foul. Maybe the most astounding no-call in NBA history.