Bob Sturm - This Year Is Different: How the Mavs Won It All—The Official Story

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Copyright 2011 by Bob Sturm
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First Diversion Books edition December 2011.

ISBN: 9780983988557 (ebook)

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To my family

My great and beautiful wife, Sally.

And my three children: Madeline, Brett and Justin.

They are what truly matter.

They always seem to understand that Dad has to work today. I will try to adjust that perception.

Tremendous.

Thats about the only word I can use to describe what the last 30 days have been like.

Professional sports is an incredibly humbling business. No team wins every year. Many teams have never won. Far more often than not, there is the game/series that got away from you that ended the season with a loss. Not this year.

Tremendous.

For me, the entire season came down to the last 90 seconds of Game 6 of the NBA Finals. Our clinching game. I cant even begin to tell you all the emotions I experienced in the course of those 90 seconds.

You see, I refused to let myself think we were going to win. I refused to get ahead of the game. Too many times, I had seen games get away from our team. Too many times, I had seen our team snatch away what the other side thought was a sure win. We had come from way behind to win games in every series in this playoff run. If we could do it to them, they could do it to us. In my mind, if I even began to think that a win was a certainty, I would jinx us.

It wasnt until there were about 90 seconds left in Game 6 that I let myself accept that we were going to be World Champs. I began screaming, letting out eight months of stress, releasing every doubt I had, every dumbass superstition I had. I was transitioning from I know we can, I hope we can to We are the Champions. I was feeling joy for every guy wearing a Mavs uniform, and every Mavs fan around the world who had to be feeling just as happy as me.

Thirty days later, its still surreal. Im still thrilled for every guy who put his blood, sweat and tears onto the court. Im also happy for every player who was a positive part of the Mavs since I bought the team. We have a culture at the Mavs of which Im very proud.

In these last 30 days, there have been surprises as well.

The first is just how many people around the country were rooting for us. As I travel around the nation, the response and support is far beyond anything I have experienced. People are genuinely pleased that the Mavs won. I got off a plane in New York a couple days after we won, and people at the terminal just stood up and started clapping. In New York!

The second, and still most amazing to me, is how Dallas-Fort Worth and all of North Texas is responding to the Mavs. I expect people to come up and congratulate me. But that isnt what is happening. Instead, people are thanking me. Thanking me for the unity and camaraderie people in the region felt as EVERYONE got behind the Mavs and cheered us on to a championship. Thanking me for the closeness shared between friends, families, and communities, as they cheered together.

This wasnt my team. This wasnt the players team. This was OUR team. Our familys. Our friends. Our companys. Our citys. The Dallas Mavericks belonged to all of us and brought joy to all of us.

To be part of something so special is tremendous.

Mark Cuban

July 12, 2011

I did not grow up a Mavericks fan. Instead, I was a Milwaukee Bucks fan as a boy growing up in Wisconsin, and the first coach of dominant influence on my life was Don Nelson. His tactics were always thought of as outside the box and a bit wacky. Milwaukee was the little kid on the block that had sand kicked in its face by Boston and Philadelphia, and Don Nelson was not going to go out without a fight. He had a style that was perfect for that setting, and the dumped-on fans of Wisconsin found his abrasive style easy to rally behind.

I was just 11 when his team swept Boston in the 1983 playoffs, but he was clearly the first basketball coach to capture my imagination. When he left over a contract (as he is wont to do), the Bucks stayed strong for a few years, but soon dropped back to the obscurity that the basketball world believed Milwaukee deserved.

So, when I took my first big radio job in Dallas in June 1998, it certainly was noted that Don Nelson was running the show in my new home city. The week I was interviewed for the job was the same week that Dirk Nowitzki was acquired by the Mavericks in a draft-day trade with Milwaukee. During the time between my youth and 1998, Don Nelson certainly had moved perceptually from wise tactician to mad scientist in the minds of so many in the NBA. He had fall-outs in Golden State and New York that did not reflect very well on him, and as the Mavericks continued floundering near the bottom of the NBA, Nelson was hired to try to fix them. At first, it looked like he made them worse.

When I arrived in Dallas, the Stars had just signed Brett Hull as the final piece of the puzzle for the Stanley Cup they would win 12 months later. The Cowboys still had the legendary Triplets in place, and despite Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin all getting to the point of their careers where another Super Bowl was appearing more remote, the city believed they could do it once more. The Rangers, a team that had periods of futility rivaling the Mavericks, were on their way to another AL West crown. They would win three division titles in four seasons between 1996-99 and it would represent the most success the local baseball team would enjoy.

And then there were the Mavericks. It had been 10 years since their last real chance at taking down Pat Rileys Los Angeles Lakers in the playoffs in the halcyon days of the franchise, and the decade of decline since was nothing short of pathetic. By the time I moved into my tiny new apartment in Dallas, the Mavericks had completely disappeared into irrelevance on the local landscape. Things were so sad that the city actually turned out a rare capacity crowd when their 20-62 Mavericks had their one big smile of the season back in March 1998, defeating Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls at Reunion Arena for their 14th win. The home crowd, mostly present for a glimpse of the rock star roster of Chicago, didnt quite know how to react to the result. Most wore their Jordan and Pippen jerseys home. The majority of local basketball fans didnt feel they had a home team anymore.

Because of the third lockout in NBA history, the 1998-99 season was shortened to 50 games and didnt start until Feb. 5. Aside from catching a glimpse of the new German rookie Nowitzki, there was little reason to watch this team. Even the Nowitzki acquisition was thought of as the reach of a mad scientist. After all, Paul Pierce was available and everybody knew that he could play. But a 20-year-old from Germany? Be serious. Germany had never produced a player better than Detlef Schrempf, whom Dallas drafted in 1985. Schrempf was a nice enough player, but nowhere near worth a career of watching Paul Pierce or Robert Traylor. Or so the papers said.