While there has been no formal announcement that the Dallas Mavericks will honor Dirk Nowitzki in this way, the future Hall of Famer’s silhouette has been spotted on the American Airlines Center court in NBA 2K20.
The Mavs’ public relations department told me that they couldn’t confirm that the homage would end up on the team’s court in real life and Brad Townsend of the Dallas News didn’t have much better luck when he contacted franchise owner Mark Cuban.
Images of the court blew up on Reddit when a Twitter user popular for publishing concept designs, @SkylerInDallas, said that the feature would be included on the team’s new-look home turf. He also included what appears to be an Instagram story screenshot of the court with mats covering where the new Nowitzki silhouette would appear and where the team’s secondary logo appeared last season.
The Nowitzki tribute was not included in the batch of leaked court designs that we wrote about last month but neither was the team’s secondary logo. Several of those designs have since been formally confirmed by their franchise’s.
Related: The Sixers have revealed they’ll be honoring franchise great Charles Barkley with a statue
This wouldn’t be the first time that the design plans of an NBA team have been leaked through a video game but its inclusion in the game doesn’t mean that this will be an official, permanent feature either.
Regardless of what the eventual status of this idea is, Cuban and the Mavericks have been vocal about honoring their franchise legend and have already moved to have part of a nearby street renamed to Nowitzki Way.
So until we hear official word regarding this one way or another, we’ll continue to hoist jumpers with our 68-rated MyPlayers from the iconic Nowitzki silhouette for as long as 2K lets us.
