'Soft Euro' Label Fuels Dirk Nowitzki's Ride Up NBA Scoring Charts

DALLAS — The irony was not lost on Dirk Nowitzki when asked for his thoughts on Chicago Bulls forward Nikola Mirotic, a 6'10" rookie marksman from Montenegro.

“He’s surprisingly tough,” Nowitzki started, setting up the perfect, and also personal, punch line: “for a Euro."

“It’s still a fun label to throw out there, you know? ‘He’s a Euro, he’s soft,’” Nowitzki laughed following a preseason practice as he discussed his formative years in the NBA. “It’s fun, but I never really worried about it too much, even though my first year I would be guarding someone on the block in front of the opposing bench and the whole team was like, ‘Take him! Back him down! He’s soft!’”

Soft. The label seems so laughable now, yet it stuck to Nowitzki more successfully than any defender ever has.

Rank	Player	Points
1	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar	38,387
2	Karl Malone	36,928
3	Kobe Bryant	32,433
4	Michael Jordan	32,292
5	Wilt Chamberlain	31,419
6	Shaquille O'Neal	28,596
7	Dirk Nowitzki	27,412
8	Moses Malone	27,409
9	Elvin Hayes	27,313
10	Hakeem Olajuwon	26,946

As the Dallas Mavericks star settles into his 17th season, he continues to cement his place as one of the game’s all-time greats. Nowitzki recently passed Hakeem Olajuwon to become the highest-scoring international player in league history. Monday evening, he passed Moses Malone on the NBA's All-Time scoring list at No. 7. Shaquille O’Neal is next at No. 6, a little over 1,000 points away. 

Yet Nowitzki, a league MVP, a champion and Finals MVP, is only a few years removed from those regular challenges to his manhood.

Soft. Nowitzki certainly wasn’t the first Euro lumped into that naive and distinctly American-born stereotype. But he may well be the last. Natural assimilation has certainly adjusted attitudes, but the NBA game has also changed. European offensive tactics—free-flowing, aesthetically pleasing, team-oriented attacks—are en vogue, and European players are in demand.

"That’s the way we grew up playing basketball," said Italian-bred Danilo Gallinari, a veteran European wing who plays for the Denver Nuggets. 

Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

Flashback to a mop-topped teenage 7-footer entering the league in 1999 following the lockout. The stranger descended upon the NBA from Wurzburg, Germany, where he was a standout in tennis and handball and could splash buckets from anywhere in the gym. Now he was about to enter the world's greatest basketball league, a league that had turned predominantly rugged and plodding and painfully low-scoring.

“Who’s the guy with the big, puffy hair?” said Miami Heat assistant coach Juwan Howard, Nowitzki’s two-time teammate, recalling his NBA introduction. “I just knew that he had a European look about him because his hairstyle kind of stuck out in everyone’s mind.”

 

Take Him! Back Him Down! He’s Soft!

“He was aware of what was being printed in all of the scouting reports. He was very conscientious of it,” said ESPN analyst Avery Johnson, Nowitzki’s teammate and later his coach. “It just continued to motivate him to do what he did best, which was make defenders pay the price for even attempting to guard him.”

Nowitzki’s arsenal and accuracy improved each season. He became one of the league’s uniquely unstoppable players, a perennial All-Star who defied the parameters of his position.

“The scouting reports about his defense, the wording started to change quite a bit in terms of, ‘not a great defender, but he competes on defense,’” Johnson said. “But they started to write paragraphs and paragraphs on trying to defend him offensively.”

Yet the soft label was always there. He dragged the weight of the Mavs’ catastrophic meltdown in the 2006 Finals against Dwyane Wade, Shaq and the Miami Heat. The next season’s gut-twisting first-round defeat to Golden State after 67 wins and an MVP season furthered the narrative.

“Sure,” said Johnson, Dallas’ coach those two years, “your best players have to play well, but you can’t be a one-man band. That’s why LeBron James left Cleveland the first time.”

Nowitzki never left Dallas, and he led a completely retooled team to the franchise’s lone title in 2011 against James’ Heat, playing through torn ligaments in his thumb and swallowing hard when James and Wade inexplicably poked fun at him for feeling ill before Game 4. 

Soft.

“It ripped opened those old scabs all over again,” Mavs president Donnie Nelson said of the Miami stars’ mock-coughing in front of rolling TV cameras.

The Heat, up 2-1 at the time, didn’t win another game.

"If I Can Walk, I'm Playing"

“I never viewed Dirk as being soft. At all. Ever,” said Lakers star Kobe Bryant, who is the same age as Nowitzki and broke into the league two seasons earlier. “I think he was trying to figure out the NBA game [early in his career], but he’s far from soft. Fans just look at the surface of the game, and it just takes the opinion of a couple people [who] run with it as opposed to looking at the game themselves. Dirk was never soft.”

Just last month in the fourth quarter of a close game at Washington, Nowitzki rolled his left ankle and fell to the floor. He limped off and disappeared through the tunnel. 

After a quick tape job, he re-emerged. And checked in.

“The trainer asked me if I wanted to call it a day,” Nowitzki told reporters afterward. “But if I can walk, I'm playing.”

Moments later he drained a three-point dagger with 80 seconds left, a bucket almost as predictable as his return. Nowitzki’s Hall of Fame productivity is a product of his legendary durability. He’s played in 1,222 of a possible 1,300 regular-season games.

“For every one of those [injury scares] that is well-known,” Nelson said, “there’s many, many more nobody knows about.”

Letting the Game Come to You

Layne Murdoch/Getty Images

The NBA’s 1990s back-it-down boredom wasn’t Nowitzki’s bag, but he was in luck. Just as he entered the league, a series of defensive rule changes were being instituted to end the grabbing and bumping and hand-checking and standing around that made the game nearly unwatchable. Playing for unorthodox coach Don Nelson, Nowitzki, point guard Steve Nash and the Mavs were off and running.

For international players accustomed to moving and cutting and passing, the rule changes were manna from heaven. Only around 25 foreign-born players were on NBA rosters in 1999. This season the league boasts a record 101 international players, more than three on average per team. The Bulls’ Mirotic has the good fortune of learning under Pau Gasol, a 7-foot Spaniard whose litheness of frame and finesse on the floor had naturally sucked him into the old stereotype.

But that was also the old NBA. Now it is so much about spreading the floor, moving the ball, driving and kicking and shooting the three. No team does it better than the reigning champion San Antonio Spurs. It’s no accident that seven of their top nine rotation players are foreign-born.

“Dirk…[Manu] Ginobili and Tony Parker, the first thing that catches your eye with those guys, obviously, is their shooting ability,” Oklahoma City star Kevin Durant said. “But once you see they have that toughness and the fundamentals of the game, they do it differently than we do it, but they do it right. They definitely changed the game for the better and made it a global game as well.”

Getting Greedy

The Mavs have retooled each season since winning the title and have assembled their most talented team around Nowitzki since hoisting the trophy. Added last month to Monta Ellis, Chandler Parsons and Tyson Chandler was triple-double threat Rajon Rondo to run coach Rick Carlisle's free-flowing offense predicated on passing and movement with very little play-calling from the bench.

Living off the pick-and-pop and trailing for straightaway threes, Nowitzki is averaging 18.5 points and 5.9 rebounds while logging the fewest minutes since his rookie season.

Dallas, off to a 26-10 start, is again a contender in the ruthless Western Conference. Even with Nowitzki slumping of late and his season shooting percentages below his standard—46.5 percent overall and 34.7 percent from beyond the arc—the Mavs boast the one of the league’s highest-scoring and most efficient offenses.

“Over the years, [the NBA has] kind of wanted more of the five-on-five offense,” Nowitzki said. “And I think that’s what you’ve been seeing.”

Nowitzki is in the first year of a massively discounted three-year contract that remarkably makes the 12-time All-Star only the fourth-highest-paid player in the Mavs starting lineup. The $25 million he’ll earn over the three years of this deal pales to Bryant’s two-year extension worth $48.5 million with the Lakers that kicked in this season.

Over the last two seasons Nowitzki has quickly ascended the NBA’s all-time scoring list, passing legends like Jerry West, Larry Bird, John Havlicek and Oscar Robertson. With 27,412 career points, he’s now passed Moses Malone for No. 7 on the all-time list.

Assuming continued good health and a scoring average of about 18 points a game, Nowitzki will catch O'Neal early next season. He’ll become only the sixth player in league history to eclipse 30,000 points, sliding him behind No. 5 Wilt Chamberlain (31,419 points), in the final year of his contract.

From there Nowitzki’s final spot will depend on his desire to continue playing. Another two-year contract would give him a chance to chase down No. 4 Michael Jordan.

“That is still weird to me. All these guys on that list I admired,” Nowitzki said. “I think that’ll sink in once my career is over and as I get older and more time goes by. Right now I’m still so worried about winning games, staying in shape and competing with the young guys that come into the league every year.”