Tim Duncan retired today. Like him, hate him, one of the greatest players of all-time, and one of the most successful. And he was, without a doubt, Dirk Nowitzki’s greatest playoff rival.
You can say that Kobe Bryant and to a lesser extent Kevin Garnett round out the “era” that they played in, but Dirk and Kobe met only once in the playoffs, long after both of their primes, and Dirk and KG only once, in 2002, when the Wolves had a far inferior team. Dirk and Duncan met six times.
Other than Vince Carter’s shot, I don’t think I’ll ever spend much time thinking about the 2014 series the Mavericks lost. While the years since they blew up the championship team have mostly involved appearing in the playoffs, the truly great period for Dallas basketball ended in 2011. Between 2000 and finally winning the ring in 2011, the Mavericks made the playoffs every year for eleven years, and got past the first round seven times. They made it to three Western Conference Finals, two NBA Finals, and won one. They averaged 56 wins, from 50 in 2009 to 67 in 2007. It’s a hell of a run that I hope won’t be forgotten, even as it drags on a little longer than memory is comfortable with. And it feels like it pretty much always involved the Spurs.
Between 2000 and 2011, the Mavericks and Spurs squared off in the postseason five times, and the really surprising thing, given that the Spurs won three titles in that span, was that it was really pretty even. The Spurs beat the young Mavericks 4-1 in 2001, in their first trip of the Dirk era. They beat them again in 2003, in a series we’ll talk about it in a minute, but then, in 2006 and 2009, the Mavericks got their own back, each victory crucial for the franchise in its own way. They lost in 2010, a loss which offered very little evidence of the magic that was about to happen. But that was important, too.
I think for a lot of people, the low point was 2003. Maybe nobody expected the Mavs to be good that fast, but they had a real chance to topple one of the better Spurs teams – a team that would go on to win the Finals – in Dirk’s fifth year. But then, after starting the series off with a ridiculous 38-15 line, he got injured, one of the only serious injuries of his career, during game three. The Mavs won game five without him and looked like they might take Game 6, with a likely Dirk return in Game 7, but then Steve Kerr happened, presaging what three-pointers from teams associated with Steve Kerr could do. A thirteen-point deficit, for the Spurs, going into the fourth, turned into a twelve-point win. When the Mavericks lost to the Kings in the first round the next year and the Suns in the second the next, it seemed like they might never break through – something, ironically, that was actually true for both of those great teams.
But in 2006, the Mavericks caught their white whale. That’s still probably the best playoff series I’ve ever watched, and you gotta figure there aren’t a lot of overtime Game 7 victories out there. But even fewer probably feature two of the three best players of their era, with a career-defining play – Dirk’s and-one, over Manu – tossed in for good measure. They should have had a ring that year, but the refs had other ideas. And then, a couple of rough years, before the Mavericks beat the Spurs again in 2009.
How close the Mavericks came shows you how remarkable Tim Duncan is.
