Mavs took their first chance on Nowitzki with deal on draft night

Dirk Nowitzki came very close to becoming a member of the Boston Celtics.

Back before the 1998 NBA Draft, the two teams with very keen interest in Nowitzki were the Dallas Mavericks and the Celtics. Other NBA teams knew of Nowitzki’s skill set from the time he scored 33 points and grabbed 14 rebounds at the Nike Hoop Summit in San Antonio in ’98 during the weekend of the Final 4.

But no teams were willing to pull the trigger on Nowitzki except the Mavs and Celtics, whose coach, Rick Pitino, knew the 7-footer all too well.

The Mavs had the sixth pick in the ’98 draft and the Celtics were armed with the 10th pick. But the Mavs had a huge dilemma.

Ross Perot Jr., who owned the Mavs at the time, had ordered Don Nelson – the team’s general manager and coach – to slide down in the draft so he could save some money. But the only spots the Mavs had wiggle room with were the seventh, eight and ninth spots.

“We were sitting there at six, and Boston had 10,” said Donnie Nelson, an assistant coach with the Mavs at the time. “We knew that Rick [Pitino] had flown over to Italy and worked out Dirk and they were big fans [of Dirk].

“We knew we couldn’t go past Boston, and so the ninth pick was the last pick that we could literally get without running the risk of losing Dirk. So we couldn’t go below nine, as 10 was sitting there and Pitino was obviously knowledgeable about the kind of player that Dirk was.”

So the Mavs negotiated a pre-draft trade with the Milwaukee Bucks. In the end, the Mavs used the sixth pick to draft Robert ‘Tractor’ Traylor for the Bucks, and Milwaukee drafted Nowitzki for Dallas.

Still, the Mavs had to sweat out the seventh and eight picks.

Ultimately, the Sacramento Kings took Jason Williams with the seventh selection and the Philadelphia 76ers chose Larry Hughes with the eighth pick. That left Nowitzki for the Mavs.

“That was probably the longest eight minutes of my entire life,” Donnie Nelson said. “I don’t think there’s any way Dirk would have gotten past 10 for sure.

“It was serendipitous that we were able to get him.”

The move for Nowitzki has paid off for the Mavs as his 19-year career – all with Dallas – includes becoming the NBA’s sixth all-time leading scorer.

On Tuesday night at American Airlines Center, Nowitzki scored 25 first-half points against the Los Angeles Lakers to become the sixth player in NBA history to score at least 30,000 points in a career.

Nowitzki’s 30,000th point came on a 15-footer with 10:58 left in the second quarter, giving him 20 points in the game at that time. However, looking back to 1998, Donnie Nelson said:

“The irony of that whole deal was that both Paul Pierce and Dirk in that draft were ranked in the top three on the Mavericks’ board,” Donnie Nelson said. “So as the night unfolded and we were sitting there at No. 9, never in our wildest dreams did we expect both Paul Pierce and Dirk to be there.”

While the Mavs landed Nowitzki, Pierce went to the Celtics with the 10th pick.

“We pulled the trigger on our first love and commitment and never looked back,” Donnie Nelson said. “I think we all understood that had we picked Paul Pierce life would have been a lot easier the first couple of years after that draft.

“But Dirk was all of seven feet tall and could play [power forward] and [center]. We thought that he had an ability to transform the power forward position in a different way than say a Kevin Garnett or some of the other guys, and that certainly ended up being the case.”

This story was originally published March 7, 2017 at 10:02 PM with the headline "Mavs took their first chance on Nowitzki with deal on draft night."