Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd led the Mavericks to their first NBA championship in 2011.
The Mavericks have three NBA Finals appearances in franchise history, including making a run to the Finals in the 2023-2024 season. They made it to the mountaintop in 2011, which stands as the team’s sole NBA title.
The 2011 Mavericks had an amazing run to an NBA Championship. The team had been bounced in the first round of the NBA Playoffs the year prior in a 2-7 upset to the Spurs, which put their 2006 run to the Finals look even further back in the rearview mirror. There were questions about whether this aging core would be able to make a deep playoff run again.
Dallas set the tone early with a 12-game winning streak that spanned from November 20 to December 11 and followed it up with a blazing-hot stretch, going 17-1 from January 22 to March 4. These runs helped bolster their position near the top of the Western Conference standings. They would go on to earn the No. 3 seed, which set the table for their run to a title.
Dallas started out by dispatching Portland 4-2. Oddly enough, that proved to be the Mavericks’ toughest test until they reached the Finals. They swept the 2nd-seeded Lakers in the second round and got by the young and upstart Thunder 4-1 in the Western Conference Finals.
The Mavericks had punched their ticket for their second NBA Finals appearance. On the other side was the Miami Heat, the team that beat them in the 2006 Finals. The Heat were in their first year with the Big 3 of Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh. They powered through the Eastern Conference playoffs, never dropping more than one game in a single series. As such, the Heat were expected by most pundits to take home the title.
The Dirk Nowitzki-led Mavericks paid no attention to that, though. The Mavericks would go on to upset the Heat in six games. It was a competitive series throughout. Dallas got an important win in Game 2 to steal homecourt advantage from the Heat but then ceded it back to Miami with a Game 3 loss. Those games were decided by a total of four points.
Dallas needed to even the series in Game 4 at home and did just that, winning 86-83. The Mavericks then won handily in Game 5 (112-103) and put themselves in a position where they had two shots at winning just one more game in Miami. It only took one as the Mavericks won it all in Miami with a 105-95 victory in Game 6. Jason Terry helped seal it with a remarkable 27 points off the bench to offset what was a tough night from the floor from Nowitzki (9-for-27 FG).
Nowitzki was named Finals MVP with 26.0 PPG, 9.7 RPG, and 2.0 APG while shooting 41.6% from the floor and 36.8% from deep. Jason Terry was instrumental to the series win and the collection of tough defenses provided by Tyson Chandler, Shawn Marion and Jason Kidd helped slow down Miami’s star power.
This is the Mavericks’ lone NBA championship to date, but it was a memorable one for a number of reasons. It cemented Dirk Nowitzki as the greatest player in franchise history. Rick Carlisle got his ring after some deep playoff runs with Detroit and Indiana. And perhaps most notably, they showed that a cohesive team with veteran leadership could beat a team built on star power like that iteration of the Heat.
