Cruel Winters

Posted by Rob Mahoney on January 19, 2012 under Commentary |

Courtesy of Jeff Caplan of ESPN Dallas, Mavs fans can now focus their frustrations on the ailing joint of Dallas’ favorite son:

Once again, the offense couldn’t get it going. Making matters worse is that legendary safety valve Dirk Nowitzki isn’t coming through when others can’t connect. The 7-footer was 6-of-18 for 17 points.

And for the first time, Nowitzki acknowledged that the right knee he’s been covering with a protective sleeve has been causing him problems virtually since the start of the season.

“It’s OK, better than it was three weeks ago, so that’s very good,” Nowitzki said. “But it’s still just stiff and I can’t move the way I want to, but it will be OK. I’m going to keep on working, get a stronger base, get my legs strong where they were in June and hopefully I’ll be back to my normal self.”

The Mavs have endured some shoddy shooting performances from Nowitzki to start the season, and at long last we have some bit of explanatory evidence beyond “he’s still not in shape,” and “he’s just missing shots.”

Few things seem to irk basketball fans more than the shooting slump, likely because such trials come from a place of utter unpredictability. Observers of the game generally value order; we peg players as known quantities even as they exist in a dynamic state, often ignoring the natural progress and regress of a season in an effort to establish something fundamentally true about a player that we can put under our pillows at night. The shooting slump — perhaps the most random and unavoidable influence of raw chance on the league’s day-to-day proceedings — comes completely without warning. If a player takes enough shots, they will inevitably get “cold,” even if such a shooting phenomenon may not really exist in those terms.

That said, removing the mysticism from cold shooting (as many researchers have done in their studies of the “hot hand”) may actually make those struggles even more frustrating to watch. Although such studies clear up the despair associated with the inevitability of a mid-slump miss, there’s something even more off-putting about a player who misses a ton of shots in a row just because the ball frequently bounced on the wrong side of probability. “He missed because he’s cold,” is simply a more satisfying answer than “he missed because he missed.”

But “he missed because his right knee is locking up,” is undoubtedly more satisfying than both, if also more troublesome. We all know now that Dirk has a legitimate — if minor — injury, and that fact retroactively helps to explain the startling number of open shots he’s missed this season. Yet it also creates a nagging concern: what if such an unrelenting schedule never allows Nowitzki the time to really loosen up that ailing knee? What if this version of Dirk — ever the creative scorer, but lacking in the physical facilities to complete his moves — loiters for the entire season? These are the whispers we’ll hear in columns, on Twitter, and in the back of our own minds for the foreseeable future. Nowitzki has finally revealed a tangible explanation for his struggles, and so long as the misses continue, we’ll cling desperately to the explanation we can actually wrap our heads around.