The Dallas Mavericks and the end of a quiet streak

In the 2016-17 NBA season, an extraordinary streak came to an end very quietly: it is, or will be, the first season since 1999 that Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavericks won’t win at least half of their games.

It’s not the most impressive accomplishment. For sheer longevity, you’d obviously take the Lakers, who did not quite achieve such a streak — the longest stretch of .500+ ball they’ve had since Kobe Bryant entered the league was nine years — but they were consistently good between 1994 and at least 2011, during which time they won five titles. And nobody, of course, is like the Spurs who actually have a streak of winning more than 60 percent of their games since 1997. And yet…

It’s really something. I think, and particularly because of the omnipresence of the Spurs, when people think of the great Mavs teams, they think about the early 2000s and lump them in with such memorable squads as the Peja-Vlade-C-Webb Kings, or Jason Kidd’s Nets, or Shawn Marion and Steve Nash’s Suns. But…in the Dirk years, the Mavs have had winning seasons, and have made the playoffs,10 more times than those Suns and Nets teams ever did. They did it eight more times than those Kings. They have been really good, not just kind of good, for a lot longer than almost anybody ever is. The Lakers, the Spurs…the Jazz for a while. The Reggie Miller Pacers. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.

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It’s over now. So, of course, is the era which spawned it. The Mavs, and their superstar, are the last cry of an era, and that era may have already closed. Goodbye, quiet streak. You were beautiful in your own way.

Let’s get the record straight right now: the Mavs weren’t title contenders for so many of those years, but there is nothing empty about how good they were. When I say they’ve had 16 straight years of .500 or more ball, it is obviously because they did have one season at .500, a 41-41 joint in 2012-13. And they were 42-40 last year. But before that, strike year aside, they won 50+ for 12 years, another year at 49 and broke 60 three different times. Overall, between 2000 and 2016, the Mavs won 838 games and lost 458, a winning percentage of 65 percent. That’s good for a little over 53 wins a season. Last year only five teams in the NBA had more than 53, and only six in 2014-15. The Mavs did it so long, their win streak could legally drive.

Nor are we talking about a team living off the vapors of a short, great run. I mean we are, a little — the Mavs haven’t been REALLY good since they blew up the title team in 2012. But I’d say their first brush with greatness was in 2002-03, when they took the Spurs to six in the Western Conference Finals despite losing Dirk to a knee injury early in the series. The Spurs would go on to win the Finals that year. They were great in the mid-aughts, losing a still controversial 2006 Finals, and were likely even better in 2007, when they won 67 games despite a shocking first round upset. Sometimes, the matchups just get you. Then, of course, they won in 2011. With a couple different rolls of the dice, we could indeed be talking about a team that won rings in 2003, 2006 and 2011. That’s a heck of a span.

It’s not Spursian, it’s not Lakersian, but even the Stockton and Malone Jazz were really only good from around 1991 — Jerry Sloan’s first year — to 1999 or 2000. Indeed, I would say it was Jazzian, right up to their two Finals losses to the Bulls. A historically great team that had the misfortune of running into some even greater dynasties. The Jazz, unlike the Mavs, were actually pretty good before Stockton and Malone got there, and of course never managed to win one. Then again, they made the playoffs 20 years in a row (18 with Stockton and Malone). Well, it’s not nothing.

As this era passes, I have no idea how to evaluate a team that was so good for so long with so much less in the way of tangible accomplishments to point to than its contemporaries. “Count the rings” is an old adage, and one that’s endured a suitable amount of scorn in sportswriting today. But then again, we do it because, to a certain extent, there’s nothing else to do. We don’t know how to talk about guys like Karl Malone or Charles Barkley, or teams like the Jazz, and we don’t know what to do with greatness that didn’t often win it all.

Honestly, we don’t even know what it means for Dirk’s various teams. Nobody can even agree on how good his co-stars were. Mention Kevin Garnett in Minnesota, and people will talk about how much he did with less. It may be true, and then again it may be that guys like Josh Howard and Jason Terry only seemed so good because of how good Dirk actually was. What we would want, to be sure what Dirk was working with, is for some guy to leave the Mavs and be just as good somewhere else but for the important players in the streak there are spookily few, maybe just Tyson Chandler.

We seem to know, say, that Howard was a borderline All-Star, or Terry. But I always wonder how somebody like Howard would have looked on a different team. He was a great two-way player for a while there, but he never scored 20 points a game in his career, and scored more than 13 only four times. You can’t quantify Terry, and nobody better try, but in his best years as a Maverick he averaged around 17 points a game, between four and five assists. In 2005-06, arguably his best season, Terry scored 17.1 on .470/.411/.800 and dished 3.8 assists. This year, Lou Williams scored 17.8 on .435/.380/.874 and dished 3.0 assists. And, Terry was an awful defender.

Then there’s the cadre of late career, cerebral players the Mavs excelled at making use of: Jerry Stackhouse, Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion, even Peja Stojakovic. It would be insulting to those guys and to what they did to quantify their years as a Maverick, which were more about brains than anything else, but it’s still the case that Marion’s highest points per game total as a Maverick was 12.5 points in 2010-11, for example. It’s impossible to explain what Jason Kidd eventually did for the Mavericks, but it’s also the case that in the year they won the championship he shot 36 percent from the floor.

All this is to say, there’s no good way to measure the magnitude of the Mavericks’ achievement, or the role played in it by Dirk, its undisputed engine. I have often observed that when it comes to how fans think of and remember teams, some guys get punished for being towards the bottom of one scale and others rewarded for being at the top of a lower one. Are we talking about a superhuman effort to make mediocre teams into perennial title contenders, or merely a great player elevating pretty good teammates to pretty high heights? Sometimes I wonder if Dirk’s utterly unique ability to warp the floor did more for his teammates than anyone suspects, or could suspect. But who could know?

What I do know is that, as a Mavericks fan, I long ago settled into appreciation, acceptance and gratitude for what Mavs fans have had. Sure, I’d like to have had more rings, even more finals berths, but it’s a pretty great thing that for 16 years I turned on the TV mostly expecting my team to win. It’s over now, but it’s quite the memory.

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And then here we are. As this quiet, unnoticed footnote in basketball history passes, so does the whole era it came from. Vince Carter may be the last man standing when it’s all said and done, but really it’s Dirk. Not just out of Dirk, Duncan, Garnett, Bryant but all the others. I’ve often described that 2011 championship team as the 2000s’ revenge — Dirk, Marion, Peja, Kidd, from just about every team that hit the wall that was the 10 rings the Lakers and Spurs won in the span of 18 years. This is in many ways the end of that, too.

What a time we had.