NPR: You don't want to be Dirk Nowitzki today

You don't want to be Dirk Nowitzki today

You could make a good case for Dirk Nowitzki being the Alex Rodriguez of basketball. Like the Yankees' slugger, the big German center for the Dallas Mavericks is an amazingly talented player. He will, in all likelihood, be the NBA's Most Valuable Player this year.

But none of that matters after Thursday's first-round loss to the Golden State Warriors, which eliminated the Mavericks (favored by almost everyone to win this year's championship) from this year's playoffs. One can only imagine what it was like to be in the company of the Mavs' overly excitable owner, Mark Cuban, last night -- there haven't been any new postings at his BlogMaverick site in a few days.

The Warriors are a good team and have always given the Mavs a hard time. But this loss is monumental in scale. The Mavs won 67 games during the regular season out of a possible 82. They dominated the league. The last time I can remember an upset of this size was 1971, when hockey's Big Bad Boston Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, broke every regular season scoring record there was, and then were ousted in the first round by the Montreal Canadiens.

And it will pour down on Nowitzki like a typhoon in the rain forest. And he knows it. There are posts all over MySpace, and on fan blogs that are saying that he basically stunk the place up and needs to go. And when NBA commissioner David Stern announces in about 10 days that the league's MVP is ... Dirk Nowitzki, people are going to demand the right to change their vote. Ouch.

Over at the True Hoop blog at ESPN, Henry Abbott offers a more nuanced assessment.

Dirk Nowitzki is what those people want. He's just as nice as people can be. He's honest. He does great, selfless things far from the limelight. And I am not one of those people who buys the notion that you can't be both nice off the court and a top competitor.
But Dirk Nowitzki, I fear, is about to be emasculated for, essentially, being a good person without a reliable way to beat long defenders who are much faster than him.

Like Rodriguez, Nowitzki is a guy you want to root for, you want to succeed. I hope it happens for him someday. I think it's probably a good thing he spends the off-seasons in Germany.

3:23 PM ET | 05- 4-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

I'm just a German and not as affiliated to the NBA as so many others of my fellow countrymen, but I always supposed basketball was a TEAM sport with a handfull of skilled athletes in each starting line-up. The days of that guy you called "Air", who won each game alone by flying over the courts are long gone! An MVP may decide a game, but he'll never win it by himself!

Sent by B.N. | 4:02 PM ET | 05-04-2007

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