Everyone knew that things were going to be tough for the Los Angeles Lakers without Anthony Davis. Davis was playing at an MVP level this NBA season, willing the team back into the playoff picture in the Western Conference along with LeBron James. With Davis sidelined, James has taken his game to another level, but it hasn’t helped the team win.
The Lakers traveled to take on the Dallas Mavericks on Christmas Day and lost their fourth consecutive game. An embarrassing third quarter, in which the Mavericks set an NBA Christmas Day record by scoring 51 points, is what they did in Los Angeles, as they managed to score only 21. The scoring explosion came out of nowhere, as the Mavericks had only scored 43 points in the first half.
Dallas ended up winning 124-115 as the Lakers wasted another excellent performance from James. He scored a game-high 38 points, going 13-of-23 from the field despite not making any of his four 3-point attempts. James went a perfect 12-for-12 from the charity stripe, grabbing six rebounds with five assists.
Los Angeles was +2 in the 34 minutes that James spent on the court, meaning that they were outscored by 11 in the 14 minutes that he didn’t play. Without Davis, that is going to be par the course as the Lakers don’t have the talent to keep up with most teams without James on the floor.
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After the game, James shared some insight on how the Mavericks took control of the game in the third quarter, crediting the adjustments that they made. A lot of the shots that they were missing in the first half began falling in that quarter, leading to an avalanche that Los Angeles couldn’t stop.
However, the comment that people are paying the most attention to is the one he made about Dirk Nowitzki’s statue being revealed before the game. Nowitzki was immortalized with a statue of his patented fadeaway, one-leg jumper, which James saw plenty of times throughout his career firsthand.
“First of all, before the [unveiling] of what the statue will look like, I already knew what the statue was going to look like. It had to be a fadeaway on one leg. It had to be. No question about it. Dirk is a legend. He is an icon. I think he is the greatest international player ever. He’s right there with Manu [Ginobili]. What he brought here, what he brought to the city, that boy was cold, man.
“Dirk was cold. He revolutionized what a stretch four big looked like. Put the ball on the ground, finish above the rim, in his earlier years. He just mastered that in between game as his career got a couple years down the line. Then, he started taking it out to the three point line. You couldn’t put a small on him because he was too big. You couldn’t really put a slow big on him because he was too quick with his first step early on. You could never block his shot because he shot it behind his head, kind of like Larry Bird.
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“Dirk, you can talk about top power forwards and top players of all time at that position. He was right up there with [Charles] Barkley, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Kevin McHale, and those guys. They tough. Dirk was tough. When you can talk about somebody with one name, you know he was tough. Dirk was tough, for sure.”
Nowitzki spent his entire 20-season career with the Mavericks that will undoubtedly end with a spot in the Naismith Hall of Fame. He was a 14-time All-Star, 12-time All-NBA Team member, the MVP of the 2006-07 season and won the NBA Finals in 2011, taking home the NBA Finals MVP award.
LATEST NBA NEWS: LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers, Dirk Nowitzki & Dallas Mavericks Updates
That NBA Finals victory came over James and the Miami Heat, as Nowitzki and the Mavericks defeated the Big 3 in six games. One of the best power forwards in NBA history, Nowitzki helped revolutionize the game for big men and international players, as you can still see shades of his patented moves being mixed into the repertoires of players today.
