Dirk Nowitzki is the greatest player in Dallas Mavericks history, and he transformed them from a laughingstock into a perennial championship contender.
But Nowitzki’s path to fulfilling his destiny was filled was frustration, as there was one team Dallas had trouble getting past — the San Antonio Spurs.
Nowitzki is about to get inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and he admitted that he used to hate the Spurs because of the rivalry his team had with them, per ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
Dirk: “I’m not gonna lie, I used to hate the Spurs.” Said they were the “big brother” always in Dallas’ way until the Mavericks finally beat them in the playoffs, but said there was a ton of mutual respect on both sides for the way they went about competing.
— Tim Bontemps (@TimBontemps) August 11, 2023
The two teams first met in the second round of the 2001 playoffs, and at the time, the Mavs were postseason neophytes, while San Antonio had already won it all in 1999.
Tim Duncan and company won in five games, and Nowitzki’s crew wrote it off as a natural part of the growth process in the NBA.
Two years later, the Mavs had become full-fledged contenders, and they faced the Spurs again, this time in the Western Conference Finals, but the Spurs won again as they powered their way to their second world championship.
However, in 2006, Nowitzki and the Mavs finally broke through.
Playing San Antonio in the second round again, he scored 37 points and grabbed 15 rebounds in Game 7 while converting a three-point play late in the fourth quarter to force overtime, where Dallas prevailed.
Dallas went on to the NBA Finals, where it lost in six games to the Miami Heat.
In 2011, it finally came all together for Nowitzki, as the Mavs returned to the championship series and knocked off the Heat in six games to finally win the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
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