Written by Nate Scott at Fox Sports.com
If I asked you to sit down and think about the 20 best basketball players of all time, then write down that list, some names would be there for just about everyone. Jordan, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Oscar, Wilt, Kobe, Bill Russell, Duncan, Shaq: Those ten are the ones that would leap out for a lot of fans. Others might toss in LeBron, Barkley, Hakeem, Moses, Garnett, Stockton, Malone. Historians of the game will make sure to include West, Baylor, Dr. J, Pettit, Havlicek.
Outside of the Dallas area, how many people are putting Dirk Nowitzki on that list?
On Tuesday night, Nowitzki confirmed he belonged with those names, however, scoring his 30,000th career point, making him just the sixth player to ever do that, joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. He becomes just the third, along with Malone and Bryant, to have done it with one team.
What’s strange about Nowitzki is that his career numbers, which are flabbergasting, don’t really go hand-in-hand with a widespread belief that he’s one of the greatest to ever play the game. An informal Twitter poll by my friend Adi Joseph has Nowitzki as the fourth best player at his position in the modern era. (Which may be true. More on that to come.)
When speaking about how Nowitzki became so underrated, a big reason why is that he happened to play the same position, in the same state, at the same time, as the greatest power forward to ever live: Tim Duncan. (I know Duncan played center at the end of his career. For the purposes of this article, he’s a power forward. Please send all complaints to thisisafreearticleontheinternetandicanclickawayatanymoment@fox.com. It just so happened that Duncan was also wildly underrated in his own way, so Nowitzki could never even really gain narrative traction that way – when discussing an about-his-business big man who was unbelievably consistent in the state of Texas, you talked about Duncan. It was (and remains) rare to talk about Nowitzki.
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