Mavericks legend Dirk Nowitzki talks about how much he enjoys watching Stephen Curry play, and how it gets him fired up
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It has been just over two years since Dirk Nowitzki played the last game of his spectacular 21-year career. He played against some of the greatest players that the league has ever seen.
While Nowitzki is enjoying retirement, he hasn’t been that far away from basketball. He regularly watches matches and keeps up with what’s happening in the league.
Dirk was recently interviewed by ESPN’s Nick Freidell, along with other greats such as Jerry West and Reggie Miller. There, among other topics, the three discussed the impact Stephen Curry has had on the game.
When the interview took place, Curry was just 18 points shy of becoming the Warriors All-Time Scoring Leader, trailing the great Wilt Chamberlain. As of now, Curry now holds the top spot, having scored 53 points in the win over the Nuggets.
“Stephen Curry is my favorite player to watch”: Dirk Nowitzki
In the interview, the three talked about how Curry changed the way the league looked at the 3 pointer line. Before Curry got to the league, only one team attempted over 10 3-pointers a game. Now the lowest number of 3s attempted by a team is 28.5.
Dirk revealed Steph is his favorite player to watch. He shared that he roots for Curry whenever the Warriors are playing.
“I’ve told these stories, when I was watching him in those playoff runs and the building there was rocking, he’d come across half court and I’m yelling at the TV, ‘Shoot the ball! Like, what are you waiting on?’ I’m fired up. He’s one of my favorite players to watch. He’s definitely changed the game from a shooting perspective.”
Nowitzki talked about how Curry introduced shooting consistently from deep. He said,
“Just to make it cool to pull up from anywhere when you cross half court. He’s the first guy to start shooting those deep 3s. Now everybody pulls up from the logo easily, but Steph was kind of the first guy, especially out of the dribble, and he just comes down in the middle of the game, shot clock wasn’t running down, and he would launch one.”
“At the time it was like, “What is this guy doing?” He was super consistent with it and people are now obviously copying that and starting to shoot from deeper.”
Stephen Curry has done the work to deserve such respect from players of that caliber. He still has quite some time to go in his career, but there is one thing for sure, Curry would go down as the greatest shooter to ever play in the NBA.
