Mavs news: Steve Nash thinks he would have won a title with Dirk Nowitzki if they stayed together

Basketball Hall-of-Famer Steve Nash says "of course" he and Dirk Nowitzki would have won a title together had he stayed with the Mavericks.

Steve Nash is the member of a very, very exclusive NBA club.

The former Phoenix Suns point guard won back-to-back MVP awards in 2004-05 and 2005-06, making him one of just 13 players in league history to win multiple Maurice Podoloff Trophies, but that's not the club we're talking about. Among the baker's dozen of players who won at least two MVPs, only Nash and Utah Jazz legend Karl Malone failed to win a championship before retiring.

There's no telling if Nash would have ascended to those individual heights if he'd remained with the Dallas Mavericks instead of signing with the Suns in the summer of 2004. Dirk Nowitzki's ongoing development into one of the best power forwards ever indeed might have precluded from winning one MVP award, let alone two. As Nash tells it, though, the Mavericks definitely would have won a title if he'd elected to stay in Dallas.

“Would we have won a championship? Of course,” he told Zac Crain of D Magazine. “Why not? I mean, you never know. Keeping me in Dallas wouldn’t have really affected their salary cap situation. They still would have been able to bring in the other guys they brought in, for the most part. I think it would have been interesting.”

Nowitzki and Steve Nash led the Mavericks to the playoffs for four consecutive seasons from 2000 to 2004, getting as far as the 2003 Western Conference Finals, where they fell to the eventual-champion San Antonio Spurs in a tightly-contested six-game series.

Dallas advanced to the NBA Finals in 2007, and won a championship four years later, the crowning achievement of Nowitzki's career.