Eff All a Y'all - Dirk is a Badass

Dirk Nowitzki gets no respect.

He is arguably one of the top 10 players in the entire league: Kobe, LeBron, Duncan, Garnett, Wade, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Nash are in there and Carmelo looks like he’s making a huge leap this year. Dirk’s consistency and reliability – he has the longest streak of 20-point games in the NBA at 28, is a former league MVP, an eight-time All-Star and a nine-time All-NBA selection – is widely overlooked. Why? Part of it has to be because he’s German and a relatively quiet star; the first things we ever heard about his private life came this past summer with the whole Crystal Taylor imbroglio, but other than that, nothing. Part of it may be the national opinion that he’s a playoff choker, a notion largely fed by the Mavs’ collapse in the 2006 Finals and the Golden State loss of 2007. Yet somehow a lack of playoff success doesn’t tarnish the reputations of Nash, Garnett (pre-Celtics), Carmelo, Paul and to some degree, even LeBron who has yet to hoist a championship trophy. Hell, until his rash of injuries, you’d even see columnists taking T-Mac over Dirk even though he’s never won a single playoff series.

If any of them turned in a performance that even vaguely resembled what Nowitzki did last night it would be on the front page of every sports website this morning, yet ESPN.com and NBA.com didn’t even have a word about it on their main pages. In fact, on NBA.com, after a couple clicks finally led me to a small picture of Dirk, they downplayed his outburst, tagging it with the caption “Nightly Notable”.

Nightly fucking “notable?!”

In case you missed it, here a few items about the spanking that Nowitzki handed the Utah Jazz last night:

-During the deciding stretch in the 4^th quarter, from 9:36 to 1:29, Dirk made a ridiculous 27 of the team’s 31 points in single-handedly bringing the Mavs from 16 down to four points up.

-He finished with 29 points in the quarter, the fourth-highest scoring quarter in NBA history, trailing only George Gervin & Carmelo (33), David Thompson (32) and Wilt (31). Let that sink in for a second. In 63 seasons only FOUR players have had better quarters.

-His overall line for the game was 40 pts, 11 RB, 5 assists and 5 blocks - a line that has only been matched by two other players in the last 20 years – Shaq in 2001 and twice by David Robinson.

Aren’t those accomplishments a little more than “notable?” Especially when you take in to account that the team was absolutely miserable offensively through the first three quarters – their 44-point fourth quarter doubled the team’s offensive output of any of the first three quarters (17-18-17-44) – and needed Dirk to go batshit to carry them out of a 16-point ditch. These weren’t empty numbers in a blowout. This was a time capsule-worthy night by a future Hall of Famer.

While celebrating the greatness Dirk threw down last night, I would be remiss not to take a look at the complete pants-shitting by supposed “great” coach Jerry Sloan. Maybe he was spellbound by Dirk’s offensive show, but how in the hell does he leave sloth-like Mehmut Okur on Nowitzki through the entire eruption. Dirk would get the ball and size Okur up like a killer whale closing in on a wounded seal – and make no mistake, Okur knew he was about to be abused – before blowing by him and scoring at will. Sloan even had noted defensive stopper Andrei Kirilenko on the court, yet sat there stone-faced, refusing to make a change as Dirk piled on the points. Hell, Sloan didn’t even call a timeout during the Mavs’ run had erased the entire 16-point lead, with 2:38 left in the game and the outcome a mere formality. Unforgivable.

And while we’re on this topic, how and why is Sloan still considered one of the best coaches in the league? Since the Jazz went to the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998, they’ve only been out of the first round of the playoffs four times, and only past the second round once, and even failed to make the playoffs three times. They’ve only won 50 games four times in eleven years and have pretty much settled in to being a borderline playoff team in the Western conference. No free agents want to deal with Sloan’s antiquated coaching style; in fact, it even looks like his current team is tuning him out. It’s comparable to Tom Landry in his final years with the Cowboys when it was obvious that the game had passed him by yet he was so entrenched in the team’s history that the organization held on to him too long and suffered because of it.

Whereas Sloan can’t seem to do enough damage for his coaching reputation to take on any water, Dirk likely will never be able to receive the proper respect he deserves, short of winning a title. You could argue that he’s a few minutes away from being held in a completely different light in NBA history. If the Mavericks had closed out game 3 in 2006 and gone on to capture the trophy, Nowitzki’s performance last night would be held up as one of the greatest in league history. Instead, it’s merely “notable.”