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> Photo Credits to Clutch Point

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On the eve of his 21st season ending, Dirk Nowitzki made it official that his impressive NBA career is finally over. In a year that featured another legend, Dwyane Wade, embarking on a farewell tour of his own, the loss of Nowitzki still looms large. While both are shoe-ins for the Hall of Fame, Nowitzki’s annual dominance came in ways that quite literally changed the way NBA basketball is played. In some ways, Nowitzki was a one-man, evolutionary force over his two decades in the league. Entering the NBA at just 20 years old in 1998, Nowitzki was just a skinny teenager with a jumpshot. During those early years, NBA big men were tasked with more laborious tasks -- rebounding, blocking shots and both defending and scoring on the block. In his rookie season, the only 14 players over 6’9” shot at least 50 3-pointers.
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And most of them, at least in that stage of their career, were fairly one-dimensional, long-range specialist like Clifford Robinson, Matt Bullard, Danny Ferry and Donyell Marshall. By 2005, a year before his first Finals appearance, Nowitzki had established himself as on the NBA’s preeminent stars and was earning annual invites to the NBA All-Star game. Not coincidentally, Dallas had flipped from being one of the league’s most pathetic franchises to a 50-win juggernaut.

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The league clearly noticed that skilled big men like Nowitzki were quite helpful. That season, the number of players 6’9” or taller shooting at least 50 3-pointers per season had nearly tripled from Nowitzki’s first year -- from 14 to 39. In part because of Nowitzki, the NBA entered the era of the “stretch big.” During the mid 2000s to the middle of this current decade, teams began phasing out unskilled big men for those who could spread the floor. While there were certainly other reasons for this shift, the fact that the Mavericks were a fixture atop the Western Conference including winning the title in 2011 -- due to the impact of Nowitzki was clearly not lost on the way NBA team’s shaped their frontcourts. But while that impact was more broad, Nowitzki also impacted the NBA in more acute, tactical ways that could be seen on a game-to-game basis.

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Though Nowitzki will go down as one of the best shooting big men in the history of the sport, to think of him as just a shooting specialist would be a mistake. Most “stretch bigs” featured some type of Shakespearean fatal flaw. Players like Minnesota’s Anthony Tolliver remained a specialist because he wasn’t a threat to post up. The Ryan Anderson’s of the NBA never reached Nowitzki’s level because of their inability to get to good shots when chased off the 3-point line.

And the vast majority of stretch bigs simply could never match Nowitzki’s level as a shooter. It’s mostly because of that last part that Nowitzki created an entirely new tactic in the NBA -- the nail iso. When a shooter like Nowitzki comes to screen for the ballhandler -- known as a pick-and-pop it typically creates a problem for opposing defenses if they stick to a coverage that keeps both defenders guarding their own men. But one coverage, “switching”, tends to be the most effectively nullifier of pick-and-pops that NBA defenses turn to. By simply letting the smaller player switch onto the bigger shooter and the bigger player swap onto the smaller ballhandler , a defense can avoid any tricky maneuvering and force the opposing offense to attack the switch or run another action as the shot clock ticks down. Switches effectively shut down the ability of player’s like Anderson and Tolliver to hurt a defense with their shooting.

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But part of Nowitzk’s greatness is that he found a way to beat that too. Before Dirk, players posted switches in one of two areas: on the block or slightly higher on the wing Early in his career, Nowitzki tried to beat switches in that same traditional way. The problem with attacking a switch that way is the complications involved. If Nowitzki encounters a switch in a middle pick-and-pop and tries to post up on the block, a lot can happen between the switch and the Nowitzki getting the ball. Depending on alignments, defenses could “switch out”, swapping defenders on Nowitzki yet again as he rolls his smaller defender toward the block. They could also front and flood or simply deny any reversal passes aimed at creating a better angle to throw the ball to Nowitzki on the block.

After a few seasons of this, Nowitzki’s first head coach, Don Nelson, had an idea: instead of having Nowitzki try to post up middle pick and pop switches on the block, he’d do it right at the nail -- hoops lingo for the middle of the free throw line. That maneuver essentially eliminated all the complications, allowing Nowitzki to walk his smaller defender down a few steps, get a clean catch and go to work. Before Nelson and Nowitzki joined forces to do this, it hadn’t happened in the NBA.

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Nowitzki essentially created the nail iso. Nowadays, seeing superstars post up at the nail is somewhat commonplace, especially when it comes to switches in the middle of the floor. But without Nowitzki, we may have never seen it. What’s even more incredible is that this tactic also withstood the analytics revolution. Taking a shot around the nail falls into the dreaded mid-range category -- the area of the basketball court with the least efficient return on shots. But Nowitzki has been so uncannily accurate from that distance that he’s made those high-arcing jumpshots from around the nail an efficient shot. Many Hall of Fame players like Nowitzki is destined to be have used their signature style of play and impressive accomplishments to leave their mark on the game. Nowitzki, however, has quite literally left his mark -- all over the whiteboards of NBA coaches for two decades.

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