2011 NBA Finals: Dirk Nowitzki Deserves Credit, LeBron James Needs to Disappear

I’m getting really tired of all the attention going to LeBron James and the Miami Heat.

Even after the Dallas Mavericks thoroughly outplayed “King James” and company Thursday night, the first 45 minutes of SportsCenter and pretty much every other word concerning the finals has been about LeBron’s disappearing act.

Meanwhile, Nowitzki is completely resurrecting his postseason legacy and leading a highly over-matched team to within one game of the Larry O’Brien trophy.

Yet all we care to talk about is how much LeBron sucks!?

Now, please spare me the comments about how even though I’m writing a piece about how we should take the focus off of LeBron, in reality all I am doing is giving him more press.

I understand that any press is good press, but in reality what I’m trying to do is shift the focus.

The Dallas Mavericks are a team of traveling corpses, pretty much. The last time Jason Kidd was a truly dominant player was when he was in New Jersey. Jason Terry has always been a good player, but he is too streaky to be a great player and Nowitzki has had to deal with his demons of not being able to finish in big spots in the postseason.

The rest of their team is pretty much a band of glorified role players!

But, despite their weakness, and despite going against a far superior athletic team that was “built to win championships,” all they need is one more win to secure the series and return to Dallas as the 2011 NBA champions.

Their leader has been Dirk Nowitzki, and I think it’s time we all start forgetting about LeBron and his problems, and start giving credit where it is due.

If LeBron feels more comfortable disappearing, then let him disappear.

Let’s put our focus on the guys who actually show up to play these big games.

To make things even more ridiculous, LeBron and D-Wade were apparently “mocking” Nowitzki and his flu from the other night.

They were apparently caught on camera coughing and joking about being sick before Game 5.

Dirk considered the “dynamic duo” to be childish, though, while Wade and James brushed it off according to Shandel Richardson of the Sun Sentinel.

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"I just thought it was a little childish, a little ignorant," Nowitzki said. "I've been in this league for 13 years. I've never faked an injury or an illness before. But it happened. It's over to me. It's not going to add anything extra to me. This is the NBA Finals. If you need an extra motivation, you have a problem."

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James and Wade downplayed the incident when asked about it after Saturday's practice. Wade said they were not making fun of Nowitzki.

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"First of all, it wasn't fake coughing," Wade said. "I actually did cough. And with the cameras being right there, we made a joke out of it because we knew you guys were going to blow it up. You did exactly what we knew. We never said Dirk's name. I think he's not the only one in the world who can get sick or have a cough. We just had fun with the cameras being right in our face about the blowup of the incident, and it held to be true. You blew it up."

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James refused to address the issue.

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"I'm not feeding into that," James said. "If you guys want to feed into everything that not only myself or D-Wade or the Miami Heat do, I think that's a non-issue. There's bigger issues in this series than that."

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Personally, I am done acknowledging LeBron James and his play in this series from this point on. Nowitzki is right. He is quite childish, and he is on the court disappearing like a little kid when it matters the most.

On the other hand, Nowitzki is going out there and being the go-to guy for the Mavericks on just about every possession. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t have two other superstars to hide behind.

He has scored 26 total points in this NBA Finals series with five minutes left to play and has shot an incredible 8-for-13 from the field in those clutch moments.

While it may seem like a joke to some, his play has been MVP worthy, and I fully expect him to be holding two trophies in his hands come the end of this series.

As for LeBron James this will be the last you hear about him from my perspective, but I’m pretty sure he’s about to find out that the joke is really on him.

Follow Andrew on Twitter: @AKonSports