Dirk Nowitzki the soft-spoken German NBA legend has one of the most legendary NBA titles in history. A true underdog tale that still is set as the benchmark of what an NBA title should be. But before that, he lost in 2006 and that loss put him in a blender.
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Of course, we can sympathize with him. Watching your team lose an NBA Finals matchup, after being up 2-0 must be tough to swallow. And what’s more, it was Dwyane Wade that single-handedly did it all. Shaquille O’Neal, despite weighing a slim 325lbs, was in a bit of a downturn and posted rather sad numbers.
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Shaquille O’Neal and Dwyane Wade beat Dirk in 2006
Of course, the real story is how the Mavericks were simply overrun by the brilliance of Dwyane Wade. But Nowitzki was in the form of his life. He had done stuff like this:
And even the Miami players were very confused as to how they can deal with a player of Dirk’s caliber.
Call it fate, call it luck, the Mavericks would go on to lose in 6 games and Nowitzki would be sad.
Dirk Nowitzki drank for 3 weeks after the loss.
Of course, like any sane man, he would go on to drink for three weeks after such a loss. We didn’t get to know of this till 2011 when he finally won and he revealed a lot about what went into winning.
He thanked fans for believing in him and how they thought he deserved it, he said, “how devastated I was after losing the Finals in ’06, so I had to go on a three-week drinking binge just to forget everything.”.
Dirk also confessed that he partied harder in the loss than in the win. He said, “I actually think we partied harder in ’06 when we lost just to forget about it than we did now”.
But all is good, Dirk went on to win and beat a much more stacked Miami team in the 2011 NBA Finals. He dropped a clinic and $100,o00 at a club on drinks.
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