With Dallas Mavericks 13-time NBA All-Star power forward Dirk Nowitzki planning on coming back for his 21st season in 2018-19, he has continued to get the utmost amount of praise from Los Angeles Lakers retired legendary shooting guard Kobe Bryant.
According to a series of tweets on Wednesday from ClutchPoints' own Ryan Ward, Bryant opened up about Nowitzki's progress over the course of his illustrious 20-year NBA career.
“Dirk kind of went the opposite way,” Bryant said. “When he first came in the league, he took a lot of threes. The year they won championships he might have taken half the threes than when he first came in the league.”
Bryant went on to say that what the 39-year-old Nowitzki has done for the game of basketball is nothing short of incredible.
“The idea of having a guy that was 7′, 7’1″ that could stretch the floor, that was revolutionary,” Bryant said. “I’m sure it inspired a lot of bigs to be able to say, ‘You know what, I want to be like Dirk Nowitzki.’ Dirk, he was looking at guys like Arvydas Sabonis, Vlade Divac, guys like that.”
During the 2011 NBA Playoffs, Bryant noted that Nowitzki's all-around growth as a player made him pretty much unstoppable when he played against the Lakers and the Big 3 of the Miami Heat.
“Dirk obviously took it to a different level because of his mobility, the ability to put the ball on the floor and spin. But by and large, when Dirk won that championship that year, the biggest problem we had with him, that Miami and all the other teams had with him, wasn’t his picking and popping, it was his ability to play at the free-throw line and below the free-throw line. For him, that was his biggest growth as a player.”
In 1,471 career regular season games that have stretched out over 20 NBA seasons, Nowitzki has averaged 21.2 points on 47.2 percent shooting from the field, 7.7 rebounds, and 2.5 assists per game.
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