Photo courtesy of Dallas Mavericks Twitter.
Though the Dallas Mavericks will not be raising the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 2022, the team had its most exciting season since 2011, when — with Preston Hollow resident Dirk Nowitzki at the helm — they did. As coach Kidd points out, it was a fun journey.
This season Dirk’s Preston Hollow neighbor Luka Dončić cemented himself as one of the best players in the NBA and led the team’s surprise run to the Western Conference Finals.
Over on the official blog of the Dallas Mavs, writers list “the best moments of a magical year.”
Those highlights of course feature both of these neighborhood stars. No matter what the future brings, Preston Hollow — also home to Mark Cuban, who bought the team in 2000 — will go down in history as hollowed ground, where Mavs legends lived, walked, slept and found “a little more yard.”
At No. 10 is Luka, who shares his Old Preston Hollow home (built with the same bricks used at NorthPark, according to Candy’s Dirt) with his Slovenian model girlfriend Anamarie Goltes, his No. 1 fan. When he made All-NBA this season, he joined a short list of players who have been first-team honorees three times before turning 24. That list consists of Kevin Durant, Tim Duncan and Max Zaslofsky.
“It was another nod to his greatness,” the bloggers says, “but there will be a lot of other elite lists that Dončić joins before he’s done.”
At No. 3, they include the retirement of Dirk’s jersey, which at the time looked like it might be the highlight of the season. But the night seemed to work a special kind of magic on the Mavs, the writers note. They beat Golden State handily that night.
“In a way, Nowitzki’s night helped this team immeasurably. They would never look back at the .500 mark again. They seemed to get energized by a night honoring the greatest Maverick of them all. And Nowitzki seemed completely fine with whatever kind of symbolic passing of the torch there might have been to Luka.”
See the “magical year” list in full here.
