NBA Q&A: Dirk Nowitkzi

Courtesy of 1310 AM

On his heightened post-three pointer celebrations:

“I do get fired up once in a while, yeah … You know, sometimes, I feel like I got to get us going emotionally too. We don’t really have a lot of ‘rah rah’ guys. I think Jet used to be a great guy always, you know, raising the crowd and making one shot and airplane-ing it down, so I feel that sometimes I’ve got to get the crowd involved and got to get us going and after a big shot, I get a little hyped. Sometimes I get a little too hyped like with the run-back … Sometimes, obviously in the fourth quarter, if you make a big shot, you figure there’s a timeout coming, so you have a little bit more time to strut, but sometimes there is no time out, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I actually do have to run back.’”

On the cameras sometime picking up on him yelling at coaches and teammates:

“I still need to get better. Sometimes I get a little be negative. With Germans, we sometimes tend to be a little bit more negative, and I think I get that from my mom.”

On some of the sound-bytes Dirk has recorded over the years, specifically one occasion in 2003 when he yelled, “What is Wang [Zhizhi] doing?”

“There were some communication problems back in the day. I remember we had had an interpreter for him, and sometimes would just say whatever. I mean, we had no ideas what he told him. But yeah, those were the good old times. We had so many foreign guys on the team.”

On the Mavericks possibly getting to 50 wins this season:

“A 50-win season in this league is very hard, and I think we had so many of them there in the first… We made it so many times in a row, and I think we kind of took 50 wins for granted a little bit here. The fans did and we did, and we just had a good team every year, and we felt 50 wins was easy, but you see after the last three years, and now even this year, it’s hard, and there’s a lot of good teams in this league, especially in the West.”

On being extremely close to a 40-50-90 shooting percentage from FG, 3PT, and FT:

“I was aware of it. I think it’s a little bit unfortunate. It would have been a great side story. It would have been fun. It would have been my second time … I think what really hurt me was homestand here where I had some bad outings before Holger flew in. Finally after that Brooklyn game, he was like, ‘I can’t watch this anymore, so I’m coming in.’ So he came the next day.”

On pronouncing his last name:

“We say No-vit-ski. It’s a hard ‘v’ … Honestly over my 16 years, it’s been butchered so many times, and now I even say, ‘Hey, it’s Dirk No-wit-zki’ myself.”

On if he would have left Dallas to pursue a title had they not won in 2011:

“Yeah, I think that would have been the ultimate goal—winning it somewhere. Still, I think it would have been really really hard for me to leave after all this time here, so I’m not sure. I’m glad I don’t really have to think about it … I’ve been here so long, it wouldn’t even feel right wearing something else.”

On staying with the same team his whole career:

“I still think it’s really special. It says a lot about the team and their surroundings and their organization and the guys, so yeah, I think it’s really special.”

On adding new elements to his game at this point in his career:

“I do always try to get better, I mean, I’m a student of the game. The hook shot is something we’ve been working on. I think I maybe shot it once this year, so that’s exciting … I worked on that for 16 years to shoot it once in my 16th year, so that worked out well.”

On his one-step fadeaway jumper:

“Holger doesn’t really like that shot. If he watched in practice, we never really shoot that shot. We shoot a runner off one leg, but never out of the post a one-step fadeaway. That was never really his shot. I kind of developed it because as I’ve gotten older, the drives to the basket is just a lot of grinding, and you go in there and get bumped three times and might not get the call, and as you grow older, you obviously want to try to be efficient and what happened was it helped me create a little room … Me being seven foot, I feel I can get that shot over anyone, so that’s really where that came from. It’s not like we practiced that one over and over. That just kind of happened during the games, and then I liked it more and more, and then I shot it more and more.

“Guys on Twitter send me pictures sometimes in my mentions. They’re somewhere in some gym, and some little white guy, like 5’10” is trying to shoot that step-back.”

On taking the SATs

“Math was ok. The English part was just… At one point I was just like, ‘C sounds good.’”

On his frequent issues with his teeth and oral surgery:

“My whole front is fake now … I got hit a couple of times. Here was the dilemma. You know I had rabbit teeth when I first came over. The first two were a little bit longer than the rest, so here’s what happened: So then you get those two knocked in, right, am I going to say, ‘Ok, put those same rabbit teeth back in?’ No. Let’s make them better. So then, I had a bridge, which was the front four, and you just shave the four down and put a bridge over it, and then a couple years ago, that bridge got hit over and over and over again, so then the teeth under the bridge were cracked, so it didn’t hold them any more. It could have gone out at any time, so I didn’t have any front four, so then I had to opt for the implants. There was really a year—and it started that year in the playoffs in San Antonio—after every season I had to have oral surgery for like 3-4 years … Other people have like knees and stings, and I had mouth surgery for like five years for sure.”

On if he still listens to techno music:

“Yeah, a lot less over the years.”

On being a dad:

“I’m actually decent a changing diapers now. It’s not too bad.”

On the last time he wore an earing:

"I retired the pink earing I think when I got here, and then the earing I rocked for maybe the first couple of years. The guys were always killing me, because, think it was out of the gum machine or whatever, so after I showered a couple of times, it was turning brown in some sports."

On the iconic photo of him wearing a cowboy hat and riding on Mark Cuban's back:

"The send that to me on Twitter almost daily. So here's what happened. We're starting to get good with the Mavs. I think that was my third year. It's looking like we're going to make the playoffs. We have Juwan Howard, Fin, Steve, and myself. And they said, 'Sports Illustrated said they want to do little photo shoot, and they want to use it as the cover.' And we were like, 'What? Cover of Sports Illustrated? Sweet! I've got to do it, right?' So they had some cowboy hats. They wanted us to do some silly stuff, so I'm like, 'Sure, I'll do whatever.' So I jump on Cuban's back, and then we find out they're not even gonna use them. They never used it! Any of it! So now I acted like this donkey, and I'm on my owner's back for the rest of my life, and they never used any of it, so they got us pretty good, I gotta admit."