Stories from Dirk Nowitzki’s incredible journey to 30,000 points

In Dirk Nowitzki’s first game, he didn’t make a shot.

It was Feb. 5, 1999, and up to that point, everything had gone right. The Dallas Mavericks’ secret plan to draft Dirk Nowitzki had succeeded, they had convinced him to come over right away, and head coach Don Nelson was bragging how he would be that year’s rookie of the year. The lockout that threatened the season had been resolved at the last moment, and the opponent was the Seattle Supersonics, where fellow German star Detlef Schrempf played. The hype had built this far, only for Nowitzki to miss all five field goals and finish with just two points off free throws.

Nineteen years later, on an iconic fadeaway jumper, Nowitzki became the sixth player in the league’s history to score 30,000 points. What a damn career.

“To be No. 6 in the NBA all time,” Mavs owner Mark Cuban said. “That’s some crazy shit.”

These are a few of the stories that define what made him Dirk.

It takes a rough rookie season for Nowitzki to adjust to the NBA before emerging as a star his second year. His transition off the court might have been even more difficult, though. Nowitzki couldn’t figure out the postal system, didn’t know how to pay his bills, and left his apartment unfurnished for weeks. It wasn’t until Cuban bought the Mavericks in 2000 that the team hired a dietitian. Before that, Nowitzki’s pregame meal was usually a Snickers and some chips.

“He had a phone bill, and a cable bill, and I had to go show him how you pay it, and how you write a check,” Steve Nash said in a 1998 television interview.

One discovery that helps Nowitzki feel more at home was a German restaurant called Kuby’s, located in Highland Park just a few miles north of downtown. There, Nowitzki finds some hometown comfort in the German dish of schnitzel.

Nowitzki has 5,383 points to his name when the 2002 postseason begins. Cuban says the first-round series, a three-game sweep of the Kevin Garnett-led Timberwolves, is when he realized how good Nowitzki could be.

“He just took over,” Cuban remembered recently. “He had the talent, he had the physical skills, but he had to have that killer instinct, and he had it.”

In three games, Nowitzki averages 33 points and 16 rebounds on 53 percent shooting. He is coming off his first All-Star appearance that year, too, and falls victim to a prank from Cuban and Nash.

“We told him to have a backpack and a toothbrush and everything, because it was an All-Star tradition to road trip somewhere,” Cuban says.

Nowitzki carries it with him for an entire day before he realized.

By 2005, a 26-year-old Nowitzki had already tallied 11,106 career points. That season brought his epochal game-tying layup in Game 7 against the Spurs, as well as heartbreak in the 2006 finals. But it starts on a lighter note that preseason, when Knicks rookie David Lee is convinced he needed to show something against the established Nowitzki.

“David Lee just thought it was the most important thing to guard Dirk, and Dirk just torched him,” Cuban says.

Nowitzki’s reaction, in Cuban’s recollection, is, “Who the fuck is David Lee Roth, and what’s he doing here?”

For what it’s worth, Lee remembered this game well but says that Cuban has embellished it a bit — in classic Cuban fashion.

Nearly six years after that moment, Nowitzki is beginning the 2011 Western Conference finals. He now sits with 22,792 career points in the regular season, leading the Mavericks franchise and entering the top 25 in NBA history. However, at this exact moment, Nowitzki has his eyes on an accomplishment much more dear to him: a championship.

Tyson Chandler remembers where he was sitting, on the visitors’ bench at the American Airlines Center at a shootaround before Game 1 of that series. He had arrived early for practice, but Nowitzki had beat him there. DeShawn Stevenson, sitting next to Chandler, leans over to him.

“All we’ve got to do is get that man there and we’ll have a ring,” Stevenson tells him.

Chandler knows he was right.

Seconds before the final buzzer had even sounded in Miami, Nowitzki is running off the floor. His 10 fourth-quarter points had made sure Dallas was crowned 2011 champion, but before the trophy is presented, Nowitzki needs a moment. He isn’t going to let the world see him cry.

A Mavericks public relations official follows him into the locker room. We have to go, he tells Nowitzki, knowing the television cameras could only wait so long. You have to receive the Finals MVP trophy, he continued.

“Give it to somebody else,” Nowitzki remembers replying.

The way Nowitzki hit 30,000 points is perfect.

Nowitzki had only scored 20 points in five games this season, but he nearly reaches that in the first quarter alone. Dallas keeps running plays for him, and those shots are barely touching the rim. Once, in a rare miss, he rushes a jumper and airballs it. Given how patient Nowitzki is in any other moment, it shows how much he’s gunning for this record, and how he’s getting it tonight.

A minute into the second, it happened. Nowitzki, isolated on the right baseline, rises up over Larry Nance Jr. for his trademarked fadeaway jumper. The ball falls through the basket beautifully, just like the 29,998 points that had come before them.

Play doesn’t stop right away, and Cuban’s frantic call for a timeout on the sidelines is ignored, so Dirk keeps playing. The ball finds him again, and he steps into a three-pointer. Of course it goes in. Only then is the timeout called, and his teammates mob him.

Cuban recalled one more moment from Nowitzki’s past.

“I’d go out and shoot before the games and I’d shoot on the practice court, and I’d go down there and shoot knowing when Dirk would come out here,” Cuban said. “And he’d always do the same thing.”

“WHOSE HOUSE IS IT?” Nowitzki chanted coming onto the court. “WHOSE HOUSE IS IT?”

“It’s my fucking house, Dirk,” Cuban told him then.

“WHOSE HOUSE IS IT?” Nowitzki responded anyway.

But that question has a different answer now.

“There’s no doubt it’s his house now,” Cuban said.