Where should Dirk Nowitzki rank among starting Power Forwards? (Locked On Mavericks)

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On today’s episode of the Locked On Mavericks Podcast, Isaac and I rank every starting power forward in the NBA. These rankings are our opinion of how PFs will stack up next season. We did not include salary or age (to a degree) into our rankings.

The names in bold are the ones where we have agreement.

Oh boy, where do I begin? If you have listened to Locked On Mavs since Isaac and I took over you’ll know we have almost never said anything negative about Dirk Nowitzki. There’s no need nor any dirt on him. The problem becomes accessing how good of a player he is despite every good thing about him. He’s the perfect example for all young players, his work ethic is unmatched, and he is still a capable NBA player. But when matched up against younger, more versatile players Dirk probably finds himself right between where I had him (#20) and where Isaac had him (#9), which is still incredible.

In these rankings we tried not to do a “futures” projection where we rank players much higher because they are younger or have a better contract but in the case of Julius Randle, Ben Simmons, and Aaron Gordon we believe they could improve greatly from last season to this (or in BS’s case just play).

The rest of these lists are fairly mundane—this is not the most exciting position. In some ways, because of positionless basketball the PF position has been outsourced. Even some of the players on this list would’ve been small forwards or centers 10 years ago. The inclusion of the stretch four, in part because of Dirk’s influence, has encouraged so many teams to start playing undersized players at the 4 (PF). There were a lot of players on the small forward list (Harrison Barnes, Carmelo Anthony, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Paul George, etc) play a lot of their minutes at the 4 spot.

Nick Angstadt (Mavs Moneyball) and Isaac Harris (Smoking Cuban) bring you the Locked On Mavericks Podcast, part of the Locked On Podcast Network.

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(We just can’t let the Warriors win more things…)