Nowitzki keeps improving

Inside the Alamodome in downtown San Antonio, disbelief settled in. Here was this lithe, blond teenager from Germany playing in the Nike World Hoop Summit, nearly seven feet tall, already 230 pounds. And he was toying with the best young American high schoolers, blue-chip prospects such as Rashard Lewis, Al Harrington and JaRon Rush.

The Americans couldn’t guard him on the perimeter — he sank two of three 3-point attempts on the way to 33 points. They couldn’t stop him from grabbing 14 rebounds. They couldn’t stop him when he drove to the rim, so they hacked him and sent him to the line 23 times. He made 19 foul shots, then said after the game, “I missed four free throws. That is not good for me.”

That was March 29, 1998, a great day for Dirk Nowitzki, one that should go down as a day that forever changed the NBA. Before that, Nowitzki was a good player for his hometown Wurzburg club team, a high-level NCAA prospect being pursued by the likes of California, North Carolina and Kentucky. Most NBA teams had not seen him play live.

But the Hoop Summit made Nowitzki a top-tier NBA prospect and set him up for stardom. It opened up the possibility that Nowitzki would be the first-ever player drafted in the lottery directly from a European team — despite Nowitzki’s private worries that he was not ready for the NBA and his public claim that he would spend at least another year playing in Europe.

“He just dominated the thing,” said SuperSonics general manager Rick Sund, who watched Nowitzki’s Hoop Summit performance firsthand. “Anybody who had not heard about him before that definitely knew who he was after that. It was quite a show.”

The Celtics were hot after Nowitzki, but the Mavericks were inspired to act.

“I thought, ‘Wow, he really is seven feet. If he’s not, he’s really close,’ ” Mavs president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson said. “He had a real good frame, you could see that he would put on weight. You couldn’t not be impressed when you saw him. He was a very, very attractive player.”

Nowitzki, of course, landed with the Mavericks in a draft night deal, and Dallas persuaded him to forgo Europe and join the NBA. Good choice. Nowitzki has become the best European player in the NBA (just ahead of Andrei Kirilenko and Peja Stojakovic), and with his performance this season has raised his stature leaguewide. When Dallas lost point guard Steve Nash — Nowitzki’s best friend on and off the floor — as a free agent last summer and replaced him with a committee of young players who were not pure point guards, Nowitzki was expected to struggle.

Instead, he has become an MVP candidate, taking greater responsibility with the Mavs and making the most of it. Nowitzki has the same deadly shooting range he did when he was a teen, and he can get his shot off on the run, from a dead stop or fading away.

But he has improved in subtle ways. Knowing he would not be getting the wide-open setups Nash delivered in the open floor and on pick-and-rolls, Nowitzki spent the summer working on his ballhandling and is having an easier time beating his man with his dribble and drawing fouls (Nowitzki shot 5.5 free throws per game last season; he is shooting 10.3 per game this year).

He improved his post game, allowing the Mavericks to set him up with simple isolation plays. Dallas still runs coach Don Nelson’s offense, but Nowitzki is playing more point forward, ranks No. 3 in the league in scoring and, through last weekend, had scored 30 points nine times this season after reaching 30 only a dozen times all of last season.

“I am focused more on getting to the basket — trying to do more things,” Nowitzki said. “I have to be. Steve would set up a lot of the offense, but that’s changed. A lot more of it has to come from me.”

And it has, so much that Nowitzki has played his way into the game’s elite. He is Dallas’ primary offensive option, only one of two international players (Pau Gasol of Memphis is the other) who can make that claim. Now in his seventh season, Nowitzki is on his way to his fourth consecutive All-Star appearance. He has had as much impact on the way teams look at European players as Minnesota’s Kevin Garnett has had on how high school players are viewed – perhaps even more.

Garnett was followed by a string of successful preps-to-pros players, including Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal. That hasn’t happened with Nowitzki and international players. Each year, oversized European sharpshooters enter the draft bearing Nowitzki comparisons. Big guys with outside shots such as Vladimir Radmanovic, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Darko Milicic, Zarko Cabarkapa and Maciej Lampe have turned out to be bench players but were picked higher than they might have been because of Nowitzki’s success.

“He has definitely helped European basketball,” said TNT analyst Kenny Smith. “But all these G.M.s go to Europe now and think they have to find that guy under a rock who can play like Dirk. It makes it look like they’re doing their jobs. There is only one Dirk. If you start taking all these kids and expecting them to be the next Dirk Nowitzki, that is going to hurt the European kids, and it is going to hurt American basketball.”

Nowitzki is more concerned about carrying the Mavs than about carrying the legacy of European basketball. With Nash gone and Michael Finley nearing 32 years old, Nowitzki must carry a team that has nine new players.

If Nowitzki is worried about his ability to hold up under new pressures, he is not letting on, much as he did not let on about his worries about coming to the NBA in the first place. Mavs fans should take heart — not only did Nowitzki handle the pressure when he came into the league, he did it so well that he inspired teams to hunt for more players like him.

“I have more responsibility now,” Nowitzki said. “I am getting more shots and being more aggressive. That’s just my job.”