How tall is Dirk Nowitzki?

Dirk Nowitzki's official height: a genuine seven-footer

The NBA lists Dirk Nowitzki at 213 cm (7′0″) and 245 lb (111 kg), the same line that appears on his player profile and his statistics page today. Unlike many listings from his era, his height has never been the subject of a serious dispute. Seven feet was the number the Dallas Mavericks used for most of his 21 seasons, and it is the figure Wikidata records with a reference to the league.

That consistency matters because NBA heights before 2019 were notoriously soft. In late September 2019, The New York Times reported that the league would require teams to certify every player's height with shoes off during the first week of training camp. CBS Sports used the occasion to list players whose numbers might fall, including Kevin Durant (listed shorter than he claimed), Charles Barkley (listed taller than he admitted) and Dwight Howard, whose combine measurements came in below his listing. Nowitzki retired in April 2019, months before the rule began, so his number was never re-certified. He also never needed it: no reputable outlet has suggested that he was meaningfully shorter than seven feet, and photographs beside other measured seven-footers support the listing.

The one footnote is weight. NBA.com uses 245 lb (111 kg), the figure this site shows, while other references give 115 kg, a figure that fits the heavier frame he carried in the second half of his career. Weights fluctuate across a 21-year career, which is the same reason the 2019 NBA rule deliberately left weight out.

A tall child in Würzburg

Nowitzki was born on June 19, 1978, in Würzburg, then in West Germany. His family was athletic on both sides. His mother, Helga, played basketball for the West German women's team at the 1966 EuroBasket, and his father, Jörg-Werner, played handball at the highest international level. His older sister, Silke, was a track-and-field champion locally and later played basketball too; she went on to work for the NBA's international television operation.

Accounts of his childhood describe a boy who usually stood a head or more above his classmates, and he was already around 211 cm (6′11″) by the age of 18. With a basketball international for a mother and a handball international for a father, he grew up around elite sport, and the coordination that made him unusual among players of his size was visible early.

The pivotal figure was Holger Geschwindner, a former German international who spotted him at about 15 and became his personal coach for the rest of his career. Geschwindner's program was unconventional for a teenager of Nowitzki's height. Instead of turning him into a back-to-the-basket center, he drilled shooting mechanics, passing and movement, and placed less emphasis on weight-room bulk. The bet was that a seven-footer who could shoot like a guard would be a new kind of problem for defenses. It paid off more completely than anyone predicted.

How height shaped a revolutionary skill set

Most seven-footers of the 1990s were defined by what they did near the rim: blocking shots, rebounding, scoring with hooks and dunks. Nowitzki's height mattered for a different reason. Because he released the ball from roughly the level of the rim or higher, defenders his own size had to come far from the basket to bother him, and smaller defenders could not reach the ball at all.

The one-legged fadeaway became his signature. Leaning back off one leg made the release point even higher and pushed it away from the defender. LeBron James later ranked it as one of the most unstoppable moves in the sport's history, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook, which is a telling comparison: both moves were built on extreme height plus an unusual release.

The numbers back up the description. In 2006–07, Nowitzki won the MVP award and joined the 50-40-90 club, shooting at least 50% from the field, 40% from three and 90% from the line in the same season. That is a rare feat for guards, and almost unheard of for a player of 213 cm. He finished his career with 31,560 points, and in March 2019 he passed Wilt Chamberlain to become the sixth-highest scorer in NBA history at the time. NBA.com noted at his retirement that he was the highest-scoring foreign-born player the league had ever had.

His influence shows up in the modern game, where big men are routinely expected to shoot threes. Tall European prospects who can shoot from distance are still routinely described as the next Dirk, a comparison that only makes sense because he showed the combination could work at the highest level.

Career at a glance

Height comparisons with teammates and rivals

Nowitzki spent two decades sharing the court with some of the tallest and shortest players of his era. The heights below come from this site's data, which follows official listings.

The 2011 Finals are the most famous height story in the table. Dallas beat a Miami team built around LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, and Nowitzki was named Finals MVP. Miami often defended him with players several centimeters shorter, which left them little chance against a release point that high.

Young Luka Dončić overlapped with him for one season. Dončić, at 203 cm, was considered big for a playmaker, yet he still gave up about 10 cm to his mentor. You can line the two up, or add Nash for a three-way view, in the height comparison tool.

The opposite end of the scale produced one of Nowitzki's best-known jokes. When CBS Sports surveyed doubtful listings in 2019, it recalled him ribbing J.J. Barea, the 2011 title-team guard listed at 6′0″, about being shorter than that. If Barea was around 178 cm, the gap between the two was roughly 35 cm, about the difference between an average adult man and a nine-year-old.

The 2011 playoff run: beating length with length

The 2011 championship is often told as a story about Nowitzki's shooting, but it was also a sequence of very different height problems that Dallas had to solve. In the second round, the Mavericks swept the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Lakers, whose frontcourt featured Pau Gasol at 215 cm and Andrew Bynum, both listed at seven feet or more. Size was supposed to be the Lakers' advantage. Instead, Nowitzki pulled Gasol away from the basket and shot over him from mid-range.

The Western Conference finals against Oklahoma City posed the opposite challenge. The Thunder were long and athletic, with Kevin Durant listed at 6′9″ at the time and Serge Ibaka providing shot-blocking. Nowitzki scored 48 points in Game 1 of that series while missing only a handful of shots, one of the best scoring games of his playoff career. Against Miami in the Finals, the problem flipped again: the Heat had elite wing defenders but fewer players tall enough to bother his release, and Dallas won in six games.

That run explains why scouts value his specific combination so highly. Height alone does not win playoff series, and shooting alone can be smothered by long defenders. Nowitzki's release point meant that the usual counter to a shooter, putting a taller player on him, mostly did not exist.

The 2007 lesson

The same matchup logic had worked against him four years earlier. In 2006–07, Dallas won 67 games and Nowitzki was named MVP, but the top-seeded Mavericks lost in the first round to the eighth-seeded Golden State Warriors. Golden State played small and physical, sending strong forwards at him and crowding his catches far from the basket rather than trying to contest his shot at its highest point. The upset is still cited as an example of how a team can neutralize a tall shooter by denying him the ball, and Nowitzki spent the following seasons adding more ways to score from the post and the elbow so that strategy would work less often.

Playing for Germany

Nowitzki represented Germany from 1997 to 2015. He was named MVP of EuroBasket 2005, when Germany reached the final, and he carried the German flag at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Flag bearers are chosen for stature in the figurative sense, but his literal height made him one of the most visible athletes in the parade.

His national-team career also highlighted how rare his size and skill combination was in European basketball. Germany had produced tall players before, but none who could lead a team in scoring from the perimeter the way he did, and he became the reference point for a generation of German players who followed him into the NBA.

How Dirk compares with the average German man

Based on the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates, German men born in the mid-1970s, Nowitzki's generation, reached an average adult height of about 179.3 cm (5′10.6″). At 213 cm, he stood roughly 34 cm (more than 13 inches) above that average. Even against the most recent cohort in the data, German men born in 1996, who average 179.9 cm, the gap barely changes.

Germany is one of the taller countries in the world by these measures, yet a man of Nowitzki's height is still far into the top fraction of a percent. The average height in Germany page has the full century of cohort data, and the height percentile calculator shows how extreme 213 cm is for any population.

Retirement and legacy

Nowitzki announced his retirement at his final home game on April 9, 2019, and played his last game the next night in San Antonio. Mark Cuban promised to retire his number 41, and NBA.com described him as the best player in franchise history. He spent all 21 seasons with Dallas, the longest career with a single franchise in NBA history when he retired.

He entered the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023. His case rested on the MVP, the championship and the scoring totals, but his larger legacy is conceptual. Before him, a 213 cm player was expected to stay near the rim. After him, teams began looking at their tallest players and asking whether they could shoot. That shift, more than any single number, is why his height is still discussed in relation to the way the modern game is played.

It is also worth noting what his height did not do. Nowitzki was never an elite shot-blocker, and he averaged well under one block per game over his career, low for a seven-footer. Critics early in his career called him soft for exactly that reason: he did not play the way people expected someone of 213 cm to play. The criticism faded as the titles, awards and scoring records piled up, and it now reads as a sign of how fixed the old idea of a seven-footer's job had been.

For more of the sport's tallest stars, browse the tallest people lists or see how he stacks up against fellow seven-footers in the celebrity height directory.