Dirk Nowitzki closed out the Dallas Mavericks’ win on Tuesday as he’s done so many times before. In this instance, he was wearing a suit, watching from the scorer’s table, talking into a microphone, exclaiming, “Yessir, that’s what you do,” when Jalen Brunson’s layup clinched victory against the Minnesota Timberwolves. But the franchise’s greatest player has always produced in the final minutes. Even in this context, it was no different.

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Just 48 hours earlier, Nowitzki had agreed to join the team’s television production as color commentator that evening. It had first been imagined he would join for a segment, perhaps an entire quarter, but Mavericks Vice President of Basketball Communications Scott Tomlin asked him if, by chance, he was interested in announcing the entire game. “Yeah, sure, I can do that,” he replied.

For two hours, Nowitzki held court on live television, anticipating plays and telling stories, cracking jokes and not holding back whatsoever his genuine excitement, as his franchise of 21 years held onto the win. He has had famous on-air moments throughout his career, but those came as an athlete being interviewed, a player in the midst of his career. On Tuesday, he embraced the role as color commentator as if he was auditioning for the actual job.

Not long after the game ended, longtime broadcast producer Dave Keeney texted something to the other producers and announcers that every one of them felt: “That couldn’t have gone any better.”

Nowitzki showed up late for the 10:30 a.m. production meeting on Tuesday. He was on another Zoom, one which ran over its scheduled time, and asked Tomlin to alert his new teammates he was running behind. “When he jumped on the production call, I was like, ‘This is really happening,'” Keeney said. It was giggles and grins from that moment on. “The most smiles I’ve seen,” said Clay Armstrong, the production’s longtime broadcast director.

The meeting was mechanical more than instructive, telling Nowitzki which button allowed him to talk to the producers, asking what topics he wanted to cover, reminding him when not to talk over sponsored segments. “We really wanted to focus on him being a color commentator,” Keeney said, to avoid the evening sounding like a two-hour interview.

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Nowitzki peppered in his own questions, too. “He was genuinely inquisitive about things,” said Mark Followill, the team’s play-by-play voice since 2005. And he was hilarious, too, of course, so much so that the producers wished they had recorded the whole meeting.

Before the game, Nowitzki arrived in time to attend another production meeting wearing white Air Force 1s and a simple suit in Mavericks blue. For years, Nowitzki has teased Followill about his zanier fashion decisions; in the morning meeting, he warned Followill not to upstage him. So both him and Jeff “Skin” Wade, the third broadcaster, took his lead wearing navy.

Once seated, Nowitzki received a FaceTime from Luka Dončić. He flipped the camera showing him the broadcast setup before Dončić showed up in person five minutes later. Wade took a photo of the moment with a disposable camera, which had been provided to him by the Mavericks’ creative team. (I’m told that camera is in Mike Marshall’s hands now.)

But Nowitzki’s only task before the game was handshakes and hellos. “We (wanted) to ease him into it,” Armstrong said, deciding to leave him out of any stand-up shots or pre-game responsibilities. They wanted to make Nowitzki’s evening simple, even if no one doubted how good he’d be.

“Every time we’ve had him on mic, it was TV gold,” Keeney told me before the game. “We’re anticipating we’re gonna get something similar tonight.”

In some ways, Nowitzki was exactly what those involved that night anticipated him to be. He described Boban Marjanović as someone who looks like he eats lettuce wraps — “He’s ripped!” — and shared that the motto for his 21-year career was, “Hide me on D, find me on O.” He complained about the crammed seating situation, which certainly was not created with a 7-footer in mind. There were far more highlights than this one-minute video even shows:

A new type of Dirk Nowitzki highlight reel 🎙🐐

Just add it to the resume. @dallasmavs | #MFFL | @swish41

— Bally Sports Southwest (@BallySportsSW) December 22, 2021

But Nowitzki surprised both Followill and Wade with his actual analysis. “Dirk was breaking down what was happening in real time, as opposed to reacting,” Wade said. Where a typical color commentator waits for replays and pauses to explain what’s happening on the court, Nowitzki would talk about rotations and passes the moment he was seeing them. It was reminiscent of the manner Tony Romo first stood out in a broadcast booth, predicting plays and calling out audibles on the football field right as they were happening. “There were times I just wanted to listen,” Wade said.

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Followill adjusted, as play-by-play announcers always do, by giving Nowitzki that space to talk: “Two minutes in, there was just a real epiphany (about) everything he was seeing at once. And he was able to verbalize on the fly, which isn’t an easy thing to do for anyone who steps into that chair.”

Nowitzki didn’t provide an encore to his unforgettable “take dat witchu” moment from years before. “I don’t think he wanted to go out there and play the greatest hits,” Wade said. He did reference Karl-Anthony Towns’ recent comments, where Towns had described himself as the greatest big man shooter ever, but chose not to dwell on it. “He was drinking from a fire hose there for a second,” Followill said, “because he was clearly seeing so many things happen all at once.”

But as the broadcast continued, Nowitzki studied printed box scores, sipped coffee, read sponsored copy coming out of commercials and talked to the producers. If not for questions he periodically asked about technical aspects of the broadcast, those around him that night might not have known he was new to this at all.

“Nobody told him how to do this job,” Wade said, “and he was perfect.”

It would’ve been fine if Nowitzki didn’t call into the morning production meeting or show up early for the pregame. He certainly wasn’t expected to announce the entire game. “(But he was) genuinely inquisitive in learning about what we did,” Followill said, “rather than just sitting there and thinking, ‘Talk to me when you want to talk to me.'”

“He didn’t mail this in,” Tomlin said. “He did this because these are people who he cares about, and he cares about their job, and he knows they do a good job, and he knows they’re good people. He knows they do good work.”

Wade, whose radio career began with a Mavericks postgame show in 2002, often talks about how much his career has benefited from Nowitzki’s presence. “To have another adult in your life that’s younger than you that you look up to, it’s just a really weird thing to admire someone that much,” he said. But it’s been years since he’s felt nervousness around him, or any need to impress. “He’s got a really unique ability,” he said, “to make everyone around him comfortable.”

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It shouldn’t be that way. “You want to make sure everything’s perfect for the guy, because he put on such a tremendous burden for so many people and he delivered,” Wade said. But as the fourth quarter went on, Nowitzki kept nudging Wade with each Mavericks bucket, just little pokes with his elbow like you might to a friend rooting for your favorite sports team next to you.

“I got home, I had my noodles, I had my Cocoa Puffs, and I’m here talking to you,” Wade said, “and I’m just, like, ‘I am really, really lucky to be in that orbit.'”

(Photo: Glenn James / NBAE via Getty Images)