With one team, Dirk Nowitzki has forged a legacy. That legacy is getting close to its end.
And to think, it came down to a gamble. One of the greatest players the league has ever seen, a surefire Hall-of-Famer, probably shouldn't have been a Dallas man.
Then-coach Don Nelson took $1 million from Detroit to trade down in the 1998 NBA Draft.
“We did our research on the draft, and we didn't think anybody else would take him,” Nelson told KRLD-FM 105.3 in 2015. “For a million bucks you had a chance to lose Dirk.”
“(Going from the sixth pick to the ninth) that was the longest 18 minutes in the history of my life.