Nowitzki breaking new ground for Europeans

[stuart]

The title of the thread came from MSNBC, the same article from the Washington Post says German Rules Western Finals

It's amazing, Dirk had already cemented his status in Europe, basically anywhere outside of the USA, but with his current sucess, he's really propelled himself. Here's hoping there isn't a letdown in the NBA Finals.

Suart

German Rules Western Finals
By Michael Wilbon
Friday, June 2, 2006; E01

DALLAS -- The NBA playoffs, when they're at their best, are about the biggest stars. Role players and specialists and X-factors figure in at some point. They might even win games now and then with big shots. But the critical games, the ones that lead to championships and decide how the history of the sport is written, are usually determined by the supernovas.
And though Dirk Nowitzki probably was already in that class, there's no doubt about his spot in it after Thursday's Game 5 of the Western Conference finals.

You can go to playoff games your whole life and never see a man score 50 points. Especially not in Game 5, not in the conference finals, and surely not when he's coming off an 11-point stinker than led to a rant from the coach the following day. Nowitzki's misery was the back story coming out of the Suns' Game 4 victory and his stunning dominance was the story coming out of the Mavericks' 117-101 Game 5 victory.

When the Suns had erased a 14-point deficit to take a 77-70 lead late in the third quarter of yet another pulsating game, Nowitzki did some soul searching. "Down seven," he said afterward, "I just saw the whole season swimming away."

It was at that point, during a Dallas timeout that he told his teammates, "I'll shoot the ball, drive the ball, whatever we need to do to get this win."

The man delivered on his promise. Nowitzki outscored the Suns, 22-20, in the fourth quarter. That could be the No. 1 feat of the playoffs. He scored 50, grabbed 12 rebounds, and carried his team to a 3-2 series lead which puts Dallas within one victory of its first trip to the NBA Finals. Chances are, Nowitzki isn't going to need the kind of verbal scorching he got from Coach Avery Johnson after his 11-point, 3-for-13 effort in Game 4.

"Avery got on me pretty good," Nowitzki said. "We watched film and he let me have it."

A day later, Nowitzki let the Suns have it. Asked how such a thing could happen, Suns Coach Mike D'Antoni said it was a case of the Mavericks' best player, "just being seven feet and shooting the ball better than anybody on the planet."

Certainly, the Mavericks needed all Nowitzki's points, no matter what the final score. Tim Thomas ensured that by ripping Dallas for 26 points on 6-for-8 three-point shooting. That's how Phoenix got back in the game. And then Nowitzki took it back.

He shot it from 20 feet, drove it down the lane, hit free throws after being slammed. He took it to 6-foot-7 Shawn Marion, to 6-8 Boris Diaw, to 6-5 Raja Bell. It would have taken somebody like Dennis Rodman or Ron Artest to slow Nowitzki, and while the Suns have a lot of pieces, a defensive stopper isn't one of them.
The delirious patrons at American Airlines Arena saw something that has never happened in the NBA until Game 5: they watched a European completely take over the American game in June.

Don't get me wrong, there have been European players before now who were critical to a team's playoff success. Croatia's Toni Kukoc was instrumental in Chicago's second three-peat. Sacramento's best shooter in its best seasons was Serbian Peja Stojakovic . They were considered a huge upgrade from the earliest European players who were thought (by Americans) to be mechanical and un-athletic. Even Kukoc and Stojakovic were thought to be "soft" and unable to be more than role players who ought to defer whenever possible to the biggest American stars.

But that changed all here Thursday. Nowitzki changed it. Fifty puts you in the history books, maybe gives you a chapter all by yourself. Had Dallas lost, elimination probably awaited on Saturday night in Phoenix. Nowitzki knew Steve Nash and the Suns were looking for that one chance.

Nowitzki said he didn't have to score 30 for his team to win, but he couldn't have meant it. He had to have it in his heart, not that he was going to score 50, but that he was going to carry his team the way truly great players carry their teams to giant, franchise-defining playoff victories.

We knew he'd respond, probably score 30. But 50? Fiddy? Cinquenta? No way. He outscored Nash and Marion by 10.

So, it goes back to Phoenix and there's probably another riveting chapter to be written, what with the way this series is playing out.

They could play best-of-21 and I'd watch every second. They could run the games on a continuous loop and the series would still fascinate. Thankfully, this isn't single elimination. How silly would it be to match the two most entertaining teams in basketball just once? The beauty of pro basketball is seeing teams as supremely skilled and as desperate to win as these two.

Suns vs. Mavericks, through the first five games of the Western Conference finals, are the best the playoffs have to offer. And it figures to be that way in Game 6 and if necessary back here for Game 7 on Monday.

The shooting, the passing, the back-and-forth, the push-and-pull has been wondrous. Thursday night, with Dallas exploding to a 14-point lead, the plot took yet another twist when Nash ran so many perfect pick-and-roll plays to Thomas for three-pointers it made Avery Johnson scrap that entire defense for good.

There's no momentum worth examining in this series, just punch and counterpunch. The story of Game 4 was the return of Bell. Game 5 belonged to Nowitzki. The only thing for certain, it seems, is that this series is incapable of running out of drama, produced not by histrionics but by plan old-fashioned basketball. "Nobody," Johnson said, "is going to give in. Who knows what's going to happen from game to game. That's how great a series this is."

[stuart]

Another Dirk-Ground-Breaking article, this one from ESPN

Nowitzki on brink of an international incident

By Pat FordeESPN.com

The foreign invasion's final frontier is here.

Sometime later this month, it's entirely possible that the king of American basketball will be, for the first time ever, a complete foreigner.

If Dirk Nowitzki leads the Dallas Mavericks to the NBA title, it won't simply be the first championship for the Mavs. It will be the first championship in which the star player is a certifiable, 100 percent overseas import.

Hakeem Olajuwon, product of Nigeria, learned the game in the funkified frat house of Phi Slama Jama before leading the Houston Rockets to two titles during the NBA's Jordan Baseball Intermission. Tim Duncan, product of the Virgin Islands, was polished at Wake Forest before hanging three banners in San Antonio. Nowitzki, product of Germany, completely circumvented the American system -- no high school, no prep school, no college -- on his way to the NBA.

(Funny thing: There are plenty of people in Texas who want to dispatch the military to the Rio Grande these days to keep out immigrants, but the state has profited athletically by being home to the three greatest immigrant 7-footers in NBA history. Where would basketball in the Lone Star State be if athletic protectionism were in vogue on draft day?)

(Funny thing II: At the very time Germany is playing host to the World Cup, what if it turns out that the soccer-centric country's true star of the roundball is off using his hands in America?)

What pioneers such as Drazen Petrovic, Vlade Divac, Arvydas Sabonis and Toni Kukoc began in the '80s and '90s, Nowitzki can complete. Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker advanced the invasion last year as Duncan's wing men, and now the stage is set for a wholly foreign-schooled player to hoist the Finals MVP trophy and ride in the lead car in a ticker-tape parade.

Of course, American-made ballers Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O'Neal will have plenty to say about that. But the groundbreaking possibility exists, and that provides context and commentary on the state of the game both here and abroad.

America's shameful abdication of proper caretending to basketball's grass roots created a vacuum that foreign players have ably filled. While youth basketball rotted from the inside out in the States, it blossomed overseas. Unscarred by the American shoe wars, unpolluted by the travel-team circuit, unspoiled by the human barnacles who attach themselves to young stars, the kids in Europe and elsewhere actually learned how to play the game.

While players in the States obsessed from adolescence about getting paid, Europeans just played. Creatively. Fundamentally.

The results first came home to roost in international competition. The U.S. has been serially embarrassed, and not just in the Athens Olympics. The list includes a sixth-place finish in the 2002 World Championships in Indianapolis, where a fellow named Nowitzki was the MVP.

And now the results have come home to roost on NBA courts in the dishing, swishing forms of Ginobili, Parker, Pau Gasol, Yao Ming, Peja Stojakovic, Andrei Kirilenko, Mehmet Okur and, most of all, Dirk Werner Nowitzki.

Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff saw all this coming a few years ago, when he wrote a book titled "Big Game, Small World." Among other things, the book extolled and heralded the evolution of the European game, and the imports heading America's way.

"… These guys prospered in the NBA not in spite of their having learned the game overseas, but because they learned the game in an environment free of travel-team 'coaches,' no coherent pedagogy for teaching fundamentals, and 'maybe-I-can-lead-the-11-p.m.-SportsCenter' 'tudes," Wolff wrote in an e-mail Sunday.

"When I did the travel for 'Big Game,' Nowitzki was just a whisper, a gawky kid from Wurzburg I'd heard about from the Donnie Nelsons I'd bump into. Never actually saw him. But everything I heard about him -- size plus all-court versatility -- suggested the next stage in an evolution from Sabonis to Detlef Schrempf to Vlade Divac. And suggested that he was precisely what the NBA (at that time) so desperately needed."

The discovery of Dirk began during an NBA promotional tour of Europe in September 1997, when young Nowitzki reportedly crushed a dunk over Charles Barkley's head in Dortmund, Germany. It gained momentum in March 1998, when Nowitzki played in the Nike Hoop Summit at the Final Four and dominated the game, scoring 33 points and grabbing 14 rebounds against a team of young American stars.

Still, only two teams seemed aware of how good Nowitzki could be heading into the '98 draft: Boston and Dallas. Then-Boston coach Rick Pitino was vacationing in Italy that spring when he got a call from his general manager, Chris Wallace, asking him to make time to work out this German kid.
"He could be a sleeper," Pitino recalls Wallace telling him.

Pitino put Nowitzki through a workout in a tennis bubble outside of Rome with his brother-in-law, Billy Minardi, shagging rebounds.

"He put on a 45-minute display unlike anything I'd seen before," Pitino said. "He was the most impressive workout I've had since I've been a coach. I said to myself, 'I found the next Larry Bird.' "

Over lunch, Pitino convinced Nowitzki's agent to play coy, telling teams that his client might do one more year in the German military instead of coming to the United States to play. In return, Pitino guaranteed that he'd take Nowitzki with the 10th pick in the draft.

Only problem is, Dallas got there first. Donn Nelson, the international maven, sold his dad on Nowitzki.

The Mavs worked a trade with Milwaukee, which grabbed Nowitzki at No. 9 and dealt him to Dallas along with No. 19 Pat Garrity for No. 6 pick Robert "Tractor" Traylor. That is known as a "flat-out fleecing." Big D got Big D, Milwaukee got an overweight, under-developed, under-motivated product of the American youth system in Traylor, and Boston was left watching.
"We were crushed," Pitino said. "We were devastated."

Actually, the Celtics did wind up with a pretty fair consolation prize in Paul Pierce. But after a difficult first season, Nowitzki has become an absolute force -- to the point that several teams have struck out in drafting foreign players while searching for The Next Dirk.

This postseason his game has reached its apex. Nowitzki went from talented to overpowering in the pitched seven-game battle with San Antonio. Dropping 50 on Phoenix took his stature to another level.

Along the way, he has shown an added American hard edge that has propelled him to the top of the sport.

Anyone who ever labeled Nowitzki a typical Euro softie has to revise that now. Even from the regular season, his rebounds are up (from 9.0 to 11.9), his free throw attempts are up (from 7.3 per game to 10.2) and his three-point attempts are down (from 3.3 to 2.5). He's willing to go where the hard points are scored.

"The NBA added the toughness he needed …," Wolff said. "But isn't that ironic: Back in the '80s it was Europeans who got derided for being 'mechanical' and 'not natural.' Now brutishness is the province of Americans, and grace, flair and finesse most in evidence from guys with funny names and foreign accents." And now the opportunity presents itself for one of those guys to deliver an NBA title. The foreign invasion has reached the throne room.

[dwassernis]

First of all no german guy roles the NBA finals because Miame will take the championship and second of all Dirk's national team,Germany, sucks because he came to the finals at the european championship and they were beated by some greeks(even we the israelis played much more better) who are playing good defence and they stopped dirk very good if miame will see how the greeks did it to dirk so they could do the same thing and last thing, the national team of germany cant win any tournament because they have only one superstar and all the other players suck!!!

[robbe]

First of all no german guy roles the NBA finals because Miame will take the championship and second of all Dirk's national team,Germany, sucks because he came to the finals at the european championship and they were beated by some greeks(even we the israelis played much more better) who are playing good defence and they stopped dirk very good if miame will see how the greeks did it to dirk so they could do the same thing and last thing, the national team of germany cant win any tournament because they have only one superstar and all the other players suck!!!

First of all, Dallas' chances of winning the championship aren't that bad. And if that happens, Dirk's gonna be Finals MVP.

Second: No doubt the German NT rises and falls with Nowitzki, but for a team that "sucks", they have a pretty good record in the last 5 years. Remember: 4th in the European Championships 2001, 3rd in the World Championships 2002, 2nd in the European Championships 2005. No offence to the Israelis, but if they are the better team - where is their success?
Remember Germany beating a pretty decent Slovenian Team in the Quarter Finals 2005? Well, Dirk scored 22 in this one and got much help from role players like Roller, Femerling and Greene.

Third: You can't compare Greece in the EC 2005 Finals with the Heat in the NBA Finals. It's a completely different world. That was European team D at its best, but you cannot play that in the NBA.

[dwassernis]

First of all, Dallas' chances of winning the championship aren't that bad. And if that happens, Dirk's gonna be Finals MVP.

Second: No doubt the German NT rises and falls with Nowitzki, but for a team that "sucks", they have a pretty good record in the last 5 years. Remember: 4th in the European Championships 2001, 3rd in the World Championships 2002, 2nd in the European Championships 2005. No offence to the Israelis, but if they are the better team - where is their success?
Remember Germany beating a pretty decent Slovenian Team in the Quarter Finals 2005? Well, Dirk scored 22 in this one and got much help from role players like Roller, Femerling and Greene.

Third: You can't compare Greece in the EC 2005 Finals with the Heat in the NBA Finals. It's a completely different world. That was European team D at its best, but you cannot play that in the NBA.

I dont say that dallas's chances of winning are bad. I just dont like them and I dont wont any farther to compare between miame and grecce, i say that the deffence of greece is good for europe and if miame will play good defence and stop dirk and terry she will win.

[goga78]

I dont say that dallas's chances of winning are bad. I just dont like them and I dont wont any farther to compare between miame and grecce, i say that the deffence of greece is good for europe and if miame will play good defence and stop dirk and terry she will win.

If, then... it's nothing more than fantasizing. If Miami is able to stop Dirk and Terry... If Dallas is able to stop Shaq and Wade...

In addition, such bold predictions as "no German will rule NBA finals because Miami will win" can be left the the kindergarden department.

Speaking about the EuroBasket and Pre-Championship games, one can tell, that Germany is a good matchup for Greece. Without Okulaja, there is not a real first-class European scoring option behind Nowitki in Germany's NT. There weren't enough big bodies, especially with Femerling hurting. No big guards, too. That' made the Greek team have a favourable matchup against Germany. It had some tougher time against lots of other teams. But the fact is that Germany went to the finals, beating strong opponents like Slovenia and Spain. Israel played well but didn't match that feat by any mean. The aim with a team featunring Dirk is always to fight for medals. The aim of the Israeli NT is to get to the quarterfinals. Full stop.

[stuart]

Does Nowitzki Have the Fire?

From ESPN: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...jackson/060616

By Scoop Jackson
Page 2

MIAMI -- Ric Bucher threw the question out there hours before the game: Is he enough of an emotional leader to carry this team to a championship?


Alan Diaz/AP Photo
Dirk Nowitzki needs to stop sulking and get fired up.

It's a question you never want to ask of a leader of a team, especially one who just four days ago was being labeled the "best player in the NBA." Second to none.

But here we are, locked in a series of Spurs-Pistons proportions, and the question that followed Tim Duncan into Game 7 last year has matrix'd itself into the life of Dirk Nowitzki.

And it is a question -- love it or not, accurate or not -- that will define his career for at least the next seven days. And there will be a positive answer to the question only if, this time next week, Dirk Nowitzki is hoisting two trophies over his head … not just one.

Is it fair to go there?

To start checking a superstar's heart, soul and cojones at this time in the series, when one team isn't overtly superior to the other team.

Is it right to question a player's ability to lead after he's proven over 98 games that he has the stones -- onions as Bill Raftery likes to call them -- to take his squad to the promised land?

In the case of Dirk Nowitzki the question at this point may not be right … but it just became a legit one.

And the reason it is legit has nothing to do with his 36 percent shooting in the first four games, his four-point drop-off in scoring from the regular season, his missed free throw with the game on the line in Game 3, his 2-of-14 from the floor in Game 4.

It's legit because it has everything to do with his body language, and how once he got to the Finals it seems to have changed. Like he wants to get his swagger on, but he can't.


Alan Diaz/AP Photo
Nowitzki can lift his teammates with his enthusiasm.

It's legit because he's hanging around the 3-point line like Kells hangs around grammar schools. It's legit because when his team shoots only 31 percent from the field and he grabs only one offensive rebound on a team that, until Game 3, had never lost the rebounding battle in any playoff game this year, it gives us the right to question body parts. It's legit because on the other end of the court there's a player -- nicknamed Flash, aka MJ: The Remix -- who's making Nowitzki's "effort" look secondary.

"We're not letting him find his sweet spot," Wade said about Dirk and how they're attacking him. "We're making him work harder to get to his sweet spot."

"We want to play him tough," James Posey, he of the 15 and 10, said of the concerted effort on Dirk. "We don't want him to find his comfort zone or his sweet spot."

And because of the way it seems like he's not the aggressive player who took Manu Ginobili to the hole three weeks ago, or the one who banged Phoenix for 50 only two weeks ago, the nonquestion of his performance statistically has shifted into something much more internal. Much more personal.

Something that will make everyone watching this unfolding "question" -- whether the one spot the Heat have been serious about taking from Dirk (his sweet spot) has become a soft spot?

It is never right to kick a great player when he's down.

Or when he's simply not playing well.

Or when his team just got beat by 24 and set a record for the least points scored in the fourth quarter of a Finals game: seven.

Which basically means this column ain't right.

But the one thing the playoffs do -- especially the Finals -- is expose everything about everybody. Good, bad, ugly. Right, wrong. Truths, lies.

How players react emotionally has always been a part of the dark side of Finals exposure.

And right now, with the series tied and the pendulum swinging to the East, it seems necessary to ask when the "nonemotional cool" in a certain player is going to leave and a necessary emotional outburst (even a subtle one) is going to jump out?

When is that player going to hit a basket and run down court with his tongue out? When is he going to stop letting Shandon Anderson and James Posey look like Bruce Bowen and Ron Artest, and take them in the paint and and pound them to death? When is he going to scream at a ref for not giving him the calls when the Heat players knock him down on his 3s? When is he going to remind them who he is?

When is this player going to take over a huddle while Avery Johnson and Del Harris are strategizing and tell all 11 other players, "Screw Miami, let's show them we got some beast in us, too"? When is he going to sink a free throw and backpedal down court with his index finger over his mouth letting the crowd know that "DA-VID HASSEL-HOFF" chant that they do is a waste of their breath?


Eric Gay/AP Photo
Does have have it in him?

When is he going to stop letting Antoine Walker and Dick Bavetta punk him?

Even inside Avery, Dirk's biggest advocate, the question seems to be lingering.

"Hopefully what happened tonight will light a fire under them," he said after Game 4. "It really disappoints me when the other team is pushing and we're not pushing back hard enough."

Read between his lines.

"They're wrapping [Dirk] up. They're putting a blanket on him," Johnson finished. "Now he's got to get that blanket off of him."

And although Avery made a playground analogy about where he thinks his team needs to be psychologically and physically, is it not aggressiveness or energy that is at question with Dirk? Read the question again: Is he enough of an emotional leader to carry this team to a championship?

Emotion equating to passion. Emotion equating to verbalization, body movement, confidence. Emotion equating to emotions.

Emotions lead.

There was a moment before a practice after Game 1, when Dirk was talking to the media, and at the end of his comment a fly flew in front of him. With one swing his hand hit the table. The fly lay dead under it. Flat on the table. Dirk looked at the fly, got up and stepped away.

On Sunday he needs to recreate that moment in the huddle while the Heat are being introduced. At least that way they'll know that he cares about killing a team that's trying to kill him.