Over the weekend it was announced that NBA Finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki will miss at least the next four games for his Dallas Mavericks. Could he still be playing, with his uncharacteristically low shooting percentage and point totals? Could he continue grinding through this tightly-compressed season on the floor? The Mavericks stand at 10-7, crammed into the bottom half of the Western Conference’s top eight, right in the thick of things. It’s hard to imagine that, in a season of triple-backs, injuries around every turn and fatigue in every sense of the word, a team will fall completely out of contention without some really bad luck or a heavy dose of apathy.
And, all told, absences like Nowitzki’s are already popping up around the league. Dwyane Wade sat out his seventh game of the season — and fourth straight — due to injury in Miami’s loss to Milwaukee last night. Derrick Rose has missed time with a nagging toe injury. Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony have both sat games out with injuries that just aren’t worth playing through with the lack of rest that comes with a condensed schedule. The only option that appears to make sense is to simply shut a guy down for a little while and hope the squad stays somewhat on course until he’s caught up enough physically that whatever injury was plaguing him will, ideally, vanish for the most part, rather than linger on into the spring.
Because the spring, the postseason, is what it’s all about. Obviously, this is true every year in the NBA. The goal is always to qualify come spring, to be in the hunt, to just get in and see what happens. None of that changes this time around; however, the growing feeling one gets from around the league, especially with older teams like the Mavericks, is that to make the playoffs is one thing, to make the playoffs in one piece is another. The 66-game regular season isn’t necessarily about conquering your conference and racing to the top seed so much as it is about surviving the best a team can, then resetting come playoff time. The less teams have to wear their key players down to get there, the better, even if it means a lower seed. This year, qualifying on good terms is just as desirable, if not more-so, than piling up wins without regard to pacing or stamina.
Rest is being afforded, and it will continue to be as we go forward, so long as a team believes it can survive in the process. We’ll probably see some rather creative health statuses and DNP-reasoning for players who, more than anything, just need a freaking rest, for the good of everyone.
The interesting thing in Nowitzki’s leave of absence is the frankness of it. His whole career, Dirk has never shied from being bluntly honest. In the past, his openness in revealing just how much the 2006 Finals loss or Golden State playoff upset hurt got him the easy-to-slap-on “soft” label from every NBA follower who wakes up in May just in time for the playoffs. When he and the Mavericks won it all last June, Dirk, overcome with the magnitude of the title, memorably exited the floor in the waning seconds of Game Six. Basketball players don’t have sleeves (shirt sleeves, rather), but Nowitzki’s heart has always been stitched on the front of his tank top for all to see.
So of course, instead of this break from basketball being simply about strengthening a knee that hasn’t had time to fully heal from last season (which it actually is about, in large part), Nowitzki reminds us that yeah, it’s that, but it’s also about a guy who wanted something so bad for so long, got it at a time when it seemed his window was permanently closing, and felt pretty damn content about his place in the basketball world for awhile. Throw in an extended lockout, the uncertainty of if-or-when there’d be a season at all, and sure, maybe Nowitzki wasn’t as ready to start his famously strenuous training regimen in Germany right on schedule. Nothing else was happening on time anyway, after all.
Nowitzki’s little endurance camp has less, or, really, nothing, to do with a superstar in decline as much as it’s about a guy finally getting woken up in the present. When hitting basketball’s summit, a goal that’s been such a long time coming in a career filled with doubt and what-ifs like Dirk’s, the climb back down to the mere mortals must be tough to begin. Maybe this stint will provide an instant uptick in his numbers, maybe it will take longer still, but it does give us a timestamp for when Nowitzki got crackin’ on this season in earnest.
Games are coming as fast as they are going, everyone’s going to need a rest, and, along with that, a good excuse. Nowitzki is banged-up, which is reason enough, but that gold ball he hoisted comes with the kind of hangover one doesn’t want to shake. Basketball never stops, unless you need it to, so you can start again.
