The Dallas Mavericks shocked the world back in 2011 when the team defeated LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals. The Mavs only had one superstar in Dirk Nowitzki, while the Heat had three in LeBron, Wade and Bosh. However, Dallas had elite role players and defenders such as Shawn Marion, Tyson Chandler and Jason Terry who played their roles to a T during the Finals.
Nowitzki won Finals MVP by averaging 26.0 points, 9.7 rebounds and 2.0 assists while shooting 97.8 percent from the free-throw line. The Mavs won the series in six games, leaving the basketball world pretty shocked.
However, nobody on the Mavs was shocked since they knew how talented they were from Day 1 of the season. In a recent interview with Michael Lee of The Athletic, Shawn Marion talked about how he and his Mavs teammates laughed at all of the pundits who picked the Heat to win the 2011 Finals:
“We knew our window of opportunity wasn’t opening, it was closing,” Marion said of that veteran Mavs team, which also featured Tyson Chandler and Jason Terry.
“Everybody that picked Miami to win it before it started, we was laughing. We thought y’all was full of shit, to be honest with you. We was one of the three or four teams at the time, that going into the season, legitimately had a chance to win a championship. If you didn’t see that, I don’t know what the hell you was looking at. I guess you wasn’t looking at the TV.”
The 2010-11 Mavs team was a defensive juggernaut, led by Chandler, Marion and DeShawn Stevenson. Dallas gave up only 96.0 points per game and ranked No. 8 in defensive rating, according to Basketball-Reference.com.
Dallas was also a stellar offensive group, matching their eighth-ranked defensive rating with an eighth-ranked offensive rating. Nowitzki averaged 23.0 points and 7.0 rebounds, while Terry was the Mavs’ second-leading scorer at 15.8.
The Mavs finished that regular season with a mark of 57-25. They defeated the Portland Trail Blazers, Los Angeles Lakers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Heat to capture the franchise's first NBA title.
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