When an NBA team is about to play a momentous game, even in the regular season, it isn’t uncommon for their legends to come and lend support from the stands. It’s a bit rarer, however, for somebody else’s legend to come to your building to do so, and it’s nearly unheard of for someone else’s legend to come to your building to do so when he was a major rival of yours during his own playing days and remains employed by his former team.
But the Luka Doncic trade was unprecedented in just about every other regard, so why not break another established NBA norm?
When Doncic made his Los Angeles Lakers debut on Monday against the Utah Jazz, Dallas Mavericks icon Dirk Nowitzki was in attendance to support him.
Nowitzki and Doncic overlapped for one season in Dallas, with Nowitzki’s final season coming during the 2018-19 campaign, when Doncic won Rookie of the Year.
Doncic almost immediately took the baton from Nowitzki as the face of the Mavericks franchise upon Dirk’s retirement, and he has received plenty of support from his former teammate. All the way back in 2021, Nowitzki said that Doncic was already better than he’d ever been, and Nowitzki was an NBA MVP that is widely considered one of the greatest players in league history. At around the same time, the Mavericks hired Nowitzki as a special advisor to the team, a role he still holds to this day.
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Yet he was in Los Angeles for Doncic’s big night on Monday, supporting the former teammate who lost the chance to eventually replace him as the greatest Maverick of all time.
Ironically, Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont — likely unintentionally — took a shot at Nowitzki through omission on Sunday in issuing his first public comments on the Doncic trade. In describing the sort of players he wanted in Dallas, he named a number of league legends who he believed built the sort of culture he is looking for. Among them were Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Larry Bird and Shaquille O’Neal, but not Nowitzki.
Nowitzki is a Dallas legend, but he is also a giant in NBA history as a whole. Next season, he will become a significant voice in the media as a member of Amazon’s new studio show. Doncic’s first game as a Laker is a significant moment in NBA history, and it’s a chance for Nowitzki to support a player he shares a relationship with through those Mavericks ties, so despite the unusual nature of another team’s legend showing up to a big game, Nowitzki was one of many celebrities in attendance when the Lakers face the Jazz on Monday.
