Dirk Nowitzki spent 21 seasons with the Dallas Mavericks — the longest single-franchise tenure in NBA history — and finished with 31,560 career points, sixth all-time. He arrived from Germany in 1998 as a seven-foot teenager with a shooting touch that no player at his size had demonstrated before him, and he retired in 2019 having changed the positional requirements for power forwards at every level of the game.
His signature shot — a one-legged fadeaway from the left elbow, released at the apex of his jump with his right knee raised for balance — was technically illegal to contest cleanly. Defenders who closed out were too short; defenders who stayed back gave him open looks. The shot became the template for stretch-four play in the modern NBA, and it appeared in championship-level concentration during the 2011 Finals.
The 2011 championship remains his defining series. Miami's roster that year — LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh in their first full season together — was widely expected to run through a Dallas team that lacked equivalent individual talent. Nowitzki averaged 26.0 points per game on 42 percent three-point shooting across six games, including 48 points in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals against Oklahoma City. In the Finals, he shot 52.4 percent from the field, scored 36 points in a fourth-quarter comeback during Game 4, and was named Finals MVP as Dallas won the championship in six games.
He finished his career averaging 20.7 points and 7.5 rebounds per game. The MVP award in 2006-07 — when he averaged 24.6 points and 8.9 rebounds on 50.2 percent shooting — made him the first European player to win the NBA's most prestigious individual honor.