At the end of January, Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki thought he had the perfect new haircut. But when he walked into the Dallas training facility, he was slammed with joking insults from everyone from his teammate Chandler Parsons to the ballboys on the sideline.

The reason? The moment Nowitzki walked in, he was spotted by Parsons, who made a quick joke about how closely his hair resembled that of talk show host Ellen Degeneres. During an interview this month with The Ticket in Dallas, the Mavs star cleared up what happened with the cut.

“So it was getting to the point, right around the New Year, we said together the family –€“ we did the whole New Year's Resolution thing. And I said one of the things I wanted to try was a new haircut.

I saw it in a magazine, and this model had a cool cut. So I said to my guy ‘can you pull this one off?' And he's like ‘yeah, I think it will look good.' Man when he was done after 45 minutes … uh … it was … interesting. I tried to pull it off for a few weeks there. But it was so long in the front and during the game I kept pulling the hair to the side like I was some model. So I decided to just go short. You should've seen that day … whether it was Ellen DeGeneres, there were all sorts of things thrown around, but all in good fun.”

Nowitzki is lucky that he handles humor well, because the jokes soon took to social media:

dirk nowitzki zaza pachulia
USA Today Sports

But considering the past hair faux pas of other NBA stars — remember Carlos Boozer’s shoe polish incident? — this might not be the worst thing to happen.

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