Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and NBA legend Dirk Nowitzki have developed a strong bond during their time with the organization.

Dirk has consistently sacrificed financial gain in order to help strengthen the team that surrounds him. He does not deal with contract negotiations in the usual manner either.

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In an interview this week with CBS Sports Radio, Cuban explained that his superstar was never realistically going to leave and that he asked for less money than he ended up receiving.

“Dirk wasn’t even in the country and people couldn’t even reach him when free agency started,” Cuban said. “I basically told him, look, you tell me the price and it actually started lower. His agent said ‘how about this much’ and we said ‘we’ll have a little more money, we’ll give you more’ and as the numbers started getting bigger and bigger, it was like ‘what about this number?’ ‘We’ll give you more.’ Finally, it was like ‘this is what we got left, take it!’

“We wanted to make it a two-year deal with a team option so that people wouldn’t speculate that he was going to retire because Dirk is the type of guy, he’s just a good guy. He would hate going city to city to city and everyone asking him if he was going to retire because he has no intention of retiring after this year and, with the team option that we have, he gave us the flexibility that said ‘if we find somebody that we can send the money to that he likes, we all like, then let’s do it and if not, let’s give the money to Dirk again which I’m fine with too.'”

Nowitzki averaged 18.3 points, 5.8 rebounds and 0.7 blocks during the 2015-2016 season. The German future Hall of Famer will hope to continue to play at a high level in order to go out in style when his contract is up.