The thing about Dirk Nowitzki is that you already know you’re dead before you even see the knife.
There’s a fantastic scene towards the end of the film Drive where Albert Brooks stabs Bryan Cranston. As Cranston reacts in terror Brooks calmly holds him and reassures him that “it’s done, it’s okay. It’s over”.
On Wednesday night at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Dirk Nowitzki was Albert Brooks and me and every other New York Knicks fan in the building was Bryan Cranston – slowly slipping away, resigned to our fate.
James LeBron, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Kobe Bryant in his prime… these guys are frightening as hell to watch if your team is going up against them. But none of them are as inevitable as Dirk Nowitzki.
Every time Nowitzki received the ball with even an inch of airspace on Wednesday night I knew the possession was already over. Just count the points before the ball even leaves his fingertips, why bother with the formality and wasted time of him having to actually shoot.
Watching Nowitzki shoot an open jump shot is like watching Lionel Messi one-on-one with the keeper. Yeah, maybe he’ll miss occasionally, but when he does the world feels like a lie. In person, the inevitability of Dirk is magnified.
There is some visual phenomenon produced by the combination of Nowitzki’s height, his release point and the impossibly high arc on his shot, where it genuinely feels like the net he is shooting into is twice as big as the net everyone else shoots into. Even at 36, if I need one bucket to save my life I’m still giving the ball to Dirk over everyone else in the league.
As painful as it was to see Nowitzki rip the heart out of my Knicks (and do it with a beaming smile on his face, as sincere as it was annoyingly endearing), the misery was mitigated by a therapeutic sense of resignation. Every time JJ Barea or even Chandler Parsons hit a shot on Wednesday night (which wasn’t especially often in Chandler’s case) it felt like something that could have been prevented. Failure breeds regret. There is no angst losing to Nowitzki though; it just feels like the natural order asserting itself.
The #41 has long been one of my favourite athletes, the type of athlete where I was fine taking a seven-hour return bus trip from Austin just to see him (by the way, the list of NBA players I’d do that for include LeBron, Dirk, Kobe, Westbrook, Chris Paul and Stephen Curry. That’s it).
In the context of the theatrical arrogance of US sports, Nowitzki is an oasis of humility. He is self-effacing, unassuming and exceedingly genuine. Perhaps my favourite NBA moment of recent times was Nowitzki’s reaction to winning the Finals in 2011. After more than a decade of failure and largely unfair public criticism (remember when Dirk was ‘soft’?), Nowitzki finally got over the hump, beating LeBron and Dwayne Wade as a heavy underdog.
What was Nowitzki’s immediate response at the buzzer to this impossibly sweet, cathartic victory? He showed nothing on his face and sprinted alone to the locker room to cry by himself, away from the cameras. In an age where athletes are brands (if not entire corporations unto themselves) and obsessed with image, Nowitzki’s reaction was a beautiful reminder that these guys are ultimately human beings too.
The Knicks played incredibly hard and unreasonably well on Wednesday night. With Carmelo Anthony the Knicks would have no business playing the Mavs close, so given Melo’s absence I assumed that all the players would be planning their weekends midway through the third quarter.
To their credit, and to my bemusement, the Knicks made a game of it. They even took it to overtime on a freak final second JR Smith fadeaway. But despite JR’s fourth quarter heroics, Jose Calderon putting on his Steph Curry costume and Pablo Prigioni actually becoming the Pope during one stretch in the second half, it never felt like the Knicks had a real chance of winning. Why? Because Dirk. Inevitability.
Nowitzki turned it on in the second half, finishing with 30 points for the game and hitting the dagger shot with 43 seconds to go. He’d beaten my team in the most merciless way possible and ruined my night, but I couldn’t even begin to feel the slightest antipathy towards him. Such is the nature of greatness; it brings compassion to inevitability.
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