15 playoff runs for DAL, 5,895 playoff minutes. Every number is adjusted for the opponent faced and the league of its time.
Dirk Nowitzki has a career arc that’s still misunderstood. Seen as a perennial failure and playoff choker/underperformer until a magical run which “redeems” his whole career. In my view he was always a good playoff performer, with some series better or worse than others, who gradually got better and peaked in the playoffs much later than he peaked in the regular season. His career should be viewed through the lens of consistently great offenses and all time scoring prowess instead of this zero to hero lens that over-indexes on his 2007 first round loss and underindexes on his fantastic longevity and consistency of producing elite playoff scoring.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Dirk was drafted 9th in the 1998 draft and started at small forward. Since he was skinny and not a great rebounder (a skill drastically overrated even to this day) he was just put out on the perimeter.
By year three he had moved to power forward and was already putting up some impressive scoring: 23.5 on +8 in the regular season and 26.5 on +6.5 in the playoffs. However, back then if you were a big man who didn’t get 10 rebounds you weren’t worth your salt and the concept of true shooting didn’t exist yet. Even now, in 2026, it's a foreign concept to basketball fans around the world that 1s, 2s, and 3s are actually worth different amounts and something like fg% doesn’t tell the whole story. So Dirk was shooting 51% from the field instead of +8% true shooting and he was a 7-footer grabbing 9 rebounds and barely over 1 block per game. This along with being a skinny white guy got him the soft european label that plagued most skinny white guys in the first decade of the 2000s.
Meanwhile Dirk, alongside Steve Nash were putting up some of the best offenses in NBA history. The Mavs from 2002-2004 put up +7.7, +7.1 and +9.2 - the highest relative Ortg in NBA history. However, due to Dirk spraining his knee in ‘03 when they were ahead against the eventual champion Spurs, and an unfortunate first round series against the Kings, Nash was traded.
The Mavericks made the finals 2 years later in 2006, only to lose to the all-time heroics of Dwyane Wade, leading the Heat to 4 straight victories after being down in the 4th quarter and 2 games to 0. This combined with a 67 win burnout loss to the 8 seed Warriors in 2007 perpetuated the soft moniker and while Dirk was routinely an All Star, he paled in comparison to the other legendary power forwards of his era. Garnett won DPOY and put up a monstrous 2004 MVP season, eventually winning a title with the Celtics and Duncan just kept winning titles with the omnipresent Spurs. The lackluster defense of the German along with some of the playoff losses didn’t give Dirk a fair shake. Yes, he was flawed defensively and KG and Duncan are some of the best defensive players ever, but his offense was better than theirs in a unique way. He was the first stretch four and to this day, arguably still the best ever.
Neither the Spurs nor the T-Wolves ever had elite offenses while the Mavericks were consistently towards the top of the league while Nowitzki was putting up pretty consistent 24-26 pts/75 on +5 or so aTS in the playoffs. It was only after his book was metaphorically closed by writers and media members that his play ascended and crescendoed into one of the best scoring peaks in playoff history alongside the ultimate Cinderella story title run.
Dirk put up nearly 30 on +10 from 2009-2011 in the post-season. His 2011 run swept the 2 time defending champ Lakers with Kobe Bryant getting thoroughly outplayed.
2011 Western Conference semifinals, per 75 possessions: Pts on aTS efficiency/reb/ast/stl/blk
| Player | Pts | aTS | Reb | Ast | Stl | Blk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dirk | 29.3 | +15.9 | 10.2 | 2.7 | 0.9 | 0.5 |
| Kobe | 27.0 | -0.9 | 3.3 | 2.8 | 2.0 | 0.3 |
In the penultimate round he faced off against another skinny, hyper-talented, jump shooting 7-footer in KD. It was in this series that he played his greatest game: 48 points on 15 field goal attempts on 94% (+40) true shooting!
And last, but certainly not least, he led the Mavericks to their lone title - defeating LeBron, Wade, and decades worth of LeBron fans.
His falloff was pretty quick after the fairy tale season. A few more all star level performances in ‘12 and ‘13, but the last 5 years were pretty limited in terms of on-court impact. The Mavericks all seemed to age poorly at the same time, and trading soon to be DPOY Tyson Chandler didn’t help either. It’s almost like he was destined to ride off into the proverbial sunset after his magnum opus.
Despite his clear flaws as a defender and his nearly non-existent passing game, I’m still putting his peak at an MVP level, given his regular season success (an actual MVP and consistent elite offenses), and his excellent playoff credentials. I have him as the 4th to 6th best scorer in NBA history and comfortably in the 15-20 range. I still have the big German ahead of Giannis, Malone, and Barkley on the all time list. He has four separate 3 year peaks of putting up around 25 on +5, including the near 30 on +10 from ‘09-’11 which is among the very best in NBA history.
The Mavericks missed the playoffs in 1999, 2000, 2013 and 2017 to 2019, so those years are absent.
Multi-year windows count playoff years only. The best window depends on what you measure.
| Best by | Window | Years | Value | MP |
|---|
The team's rating relative to the opponent with Dirk on the floor. It describes the team, so it is not an on/off number.
Regular season team results by year. ORtg and DRtg are points per 100 possessions. rOff is ORtg minus the league average, and rDef is the league average minus DRtg, so a positive number is good for both. A dash in the seed column means the team missed the playoffs.
| Year | Team | Age | GP | W-L | Seed | SRS | ORtg | DRtg | Net | rOff | rDef |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | DAL | 20 | 47 | 19-31 | – | -2.5 | 102.3 | 104.9 | -2.6 | 0.1 | -2.7 |
| 2000 | DAL | 21 | 82 | 40-42 | – | -0.29 | 106.6 | 107.2 | -0.6 | 2.5 | -3.1 |
| 2001 | DAL | 22 | 82 | 53-29 | 5 | 4.61 | 107.1 | 102.6 | 4.5 | 4.1 | 0.4 |
| 2002 | DAL | 23 | 76 | 57-25 | 4 | 4.41 | 112.2 | 107.7 | 4.5 | 7.7 | -3.2 |
| 2003 | DAL | 24 | 80 | 60-22 | 3 | 7.9 | 110.7 | 102.3 | 8.4 | 7.1 | 1.3 |
| 2004 | DAL | 25 | 77 | 52-30 | 5 | 4.86 | 112.1 | 107.4 | 4.7 | 9.2 | -4.5 |
| 2005 | DAL | 26 | 78 | 58-24 | 4 | 5.86 | 110.3 | 104.1 | 6.2 | 4.2 | 2 |
| 2006 | DAL | 27 | 81 | 60-22 | 4 | 5.96 | 111.8 | 105 | 6.8 | 5.6 | 1.2 |
| 2007 | DAL | 28 | 78 | 67-15 | 1 | 7.28 | 111.3 | 103.2 | 8.1 | 4.8 | 3.3 |
| 2008 | DAL | 29 | 77 | 51-31 | 7 | 4.7 | 111.1 | 106.1 | 5 | 3.6 | 1.4 |
| 2009 | DAL | 30 | 81 | 50-32 | 6 | 1.68 | 110.5 | 108.4 | 2.1 | 2.2 | -0.1 |
| 2010 | DAL | 31 | 81 | 55-27 | 2 | 2.66 | 109.2 | 106.3 | 2.9 | 1.6 | 1.3 |
| 2011 | DAL | 32 | 73 | 57-25 | 3 | 4.41 | 109.7 | 105 | 4.7 | 2.4 | 2.3 |
| 2012 | DAL | 33 | 62 | 47-19 | 2 | 6.44 | 103.3 | 102.3 | 1 | -1.3 | 2.3 |
| 2013 | DAL | 34 | 53 | 41-41 | – | 0.24 | 105.9 | 106.5 | -0.6 | 0 | -0.6 |
| 2014 | DAL | 35 | 80 | 49-33 | 8 | 2.91 | 111.2 | 108.7 | 2.5 | 4.5 | -2 |
| 2015 | DAL | 36 | 77 | 50-32 | 6 | 3.36 | 109.5 | 106.4 | 3.1 | 3.9 | -0.8 |
| 2016 | DAL | 37 | 75 | 42-40 | 6 | -0.02 | 106.7 | 107 | -0.3 | 0.3 | -0.6 |
| 2017 | DAL | 38 | 54 | 33-49 | – | -2.53 | 105.6 | 108.8 | -3.2 | -3.2 | 0 |
| 2018 | DAL | 39 | 77 | 24-58 | – | -2.7 | 106.3 | 109.5 | -3.2 | -2.3 | -0.9 |
| 2019 | DAL | 40 | 51 | 33-49 | – | -0.87 | 109.4 | 110.7 | -1.3 | -1 | -0.3 |
His 25 best playoff games, in ranked order by default (Rank). Click any column to re-sort, for example Game Score, and click Rank to return to the ranking. Context marks the game: E for an elimination game, CO for a closeout game, and 7 for a Game 7 (5 for a deciding game in a best-of-five series). TS% is true shooting and rTS% is true shooting relative to the opponent's defense.
The sortable version of the series rows above. Every playoff series in the dataset, in order. Pts, aTS and the box score columns are per 75 possessions and adjusted for the opponent. rOff, rDef and rNet are the team's on-court ratings relative to the opponent. Click any column to re-sort.
*2003: the Western Conference finals against San Antonio is omitted because Dirk was injured in Game 3.