How Cal nearly landed Dirk Nowitzki ... and lost him to the NBA
Halfway through Dirk Nowitzki’s breakout performance on American soil, former Cal coach Ben Braun began to grow concerned.
The little-known German prospect whom Braun had recruited for almost two years suddenly was opening the eyes of some powerful NBA decision-makers.
It was March 29, 1998, the night of the Nike Hoop Summit pitting Nowitzki’s international team against 11 of the best American high school prospects in the country. At the time, Nowitzki was so unheralded that his last name was repeatedly misspelled "Nowitzski" in graphics that appeared on ESPN’s broadcast.
Over the course of two memorable hours in San Antonio, it became obvious Nowitzki wouldn’t be unknown for long. The 19-year-old scored 33 points and grabbed 14 rebounds to spearhead a major upset victory over a U.S. team featuring future pros Al Harrington, Rashard Lewis, Quentin Richardson and Stromile Swift.
“Until then, I thought we were in great shape to get him,” Braun said. “Then all of a sudden he went to the Hoop Summit and destroyed the American team and I was like, ‘Oh, no!’ The NBA folks all found out what we already knew. That just woke up all of basketball.”
To most people in basketball, Nowitzki is an NBA legend who has represented the Dallas Mavericks with humility and dignity during 21 brilliant seasons. To Braun and former Cal assistant Scott Beeten, Nowitzki is also the recruit who got away.
The morning after Nowitzki formally announced his retirement from the NBA at age 40, Beeten and Braun recalled how close Cal came to landing the German star. Had Nowitzki not showcased his unparallelled combination of size and skill in front of NBA scouts at the Nike Hoop Summit, they believe the German would have been the centerpiece of a 1998-99 Cal team that won 22 games without him.
“If he was coming to the United States to play college basketball, we were getting him,” Beeten said. “Unfortunately for us, he got too good, too fast.”
The story of how Cal found Nowitzki begins in the early 1990s when George Washington coach Mike Jarvis asked Beeten, then his assistant, to tackle a new challenge. He wanted Beeten to recruit overseas, a natural fit for a university that is located in culturally diverse Washington D.C. and has long been a haven for international students.
To say this was unfamiliar territory for Beeten at the time is a massive understatement. He had seldom been more than a few hours from his native Pennsylvania, let alone to far-flung basketball hotspots in Europe, Africa or Asia.
On his first trip to Europe, Beeten shadowed an international scout at a tournament in the Netherlands and tried to soak up as much knowledge as he could.
“He kept telling me about this big Russian kid,” Beeten said. “Actually, they said Belarusian, but I didn’t even know the difference at that point. Honest to God, I was totally flying blind.”
That big Belarusian kid turned out to be Alexander Koul, a 7-foot-1 center who started four straight years at George Washington and led the Colonials to two NCAA bids. Beeten also unearthed a handful of other successful European imports, including Yegor Mescheriakov, a Belarusian forward now hailed as one of the best players in George Washington history.
Over time, Beeten developed a reputation for finding top European talent and helping those prospects successfully transition to U.S. college basketball. That led to him receiving a tip from a European contact to go check out a blonde-haired German teenager playing for a second-division club in his hometown of Wurzburg.
The first time Beeten watched Nowitzki play, he came away raving about the skinny 6-foot-7 German’s versatile skill set. Beeten won’t pretend he knew Nowitzki would grow to 7 feet tall or become a 14-time NBA all-star, but he insists it was obvious he was looking at a high-major prospect with a chance to play professionally if he kept developing.
When Beeten joined Braun’s staff in 1997, he urged the Cal coach to fly to Europe and watch Nowitzki play. It took only a few minutes for Braun to understand why Beeten had been raving about the young German.
“Here’s this 6-11 guard shooting the ball with ease, handling the ball with ease,” Braun said. “I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, this kid’s skilled.’ When we went to see him, it was a no-brainer that we had to offer him. He was that talented.”
From that moment on, Beeten and Braun made landing Nowitzki one of their top priorities. They made a handful of trips to Germany over the next year or two, forging a strong relationship with Nowitzki, his parents and his coach and longtime mentor Holger Geschwindner.
In December 1997, Nowitzki and Geschwindner flew to the United States to unofficially visit Cal. Braun came away even more excited about Nowitzki after challenging him to a tennis match at the Berkeley Tennis Club during that trip.
“I’m a pretty good tennis player,” Braun said. “I hold my own against anybody. But playing against Dirk, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, this kid is good.’ He had great hand-eye coordination and footwork, and he was all over the net. That showed me that he wasn’t just a basketball player. He was also a great athlete.”
Kentucky, Stanford and Cal were the only three U.S. colleges to receive visits from Nowitzki during the spring of 1998. Nowitzki has spoken before about how he still roots for Kentucky and how much fun he had on his visit to Lexington, but Beeten has reason to believe that Cal would have been the prized recruit’s top choice.
“Holger and Dirk basically told us that if he wasn’t going to be taken in the lottery, he was going to come to Cal to develop,” Beeten said.
The thought of how good Cal’s 1998-99 team could have been with Nowitzki still has Braun and Beeten wistful 20 years later.
Behind high-scoring transfer guards Geno Carlisle and Thomas Kilgore, promising forward Sean Lampley and shot-blocking specialist Francisco Elson, Cal defeated three top-10 opponents that season and won the NIT championship. There’s no telling what more the Bears could have achieved if they added a 7-footer with an unblockable turnaround jump shot and range out to the 3-point arc.
“You throw Dirk Nowitzki in with that group, and that’s a possible Final Four team,” Beeten said.
Added Braun with a chuckle, “We wouldn’t have been in the NIT, that’s for sure.”
When Nowitzki received his invitation to the 1998 Hoop Summit, Beeten admits he was praying that the German forward wouldn’t go. Beeten didn’t want anyone else seeing Nowitzki play and realizing the potential that he had.
Once Nowitzki introduced himself to the NBA during practices that week and then dominated during the World team’s 104-99 victory, Cal’s chances of landing him fizzled. The Dallas Mavericks told Nowitzki that he we would not slip past where they were drafting, as did several other NBA teams.
When Dallas traded with Milwaukee to land Nowitzki — the ninth overall pick in the 1998 NBA draft — Braun expected the German forward to have a strong NBA career. But not even he thought Nowitzki would retire as the NBA’s sixth-leading all-time scorer and a former regular-season and NBA Finals MVP.
“As good as we all thought he was, I don’t think we would have predicted he’d have this long and illustrious of a career,” Braun said. “That’s to Dirk’s credit. He’s elevated his game every step of the way.”
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