Does the NBA Have Any More Statue-Worthy Superstars?

Every statue of an athlete is a contradiction. You can capture a player’s likeness and you can do justice to what they’ve achieved, but it’s impossible to fully render a career spent in motion with a sculpture. The challenge of immortalizing sporting legends is to try anyway—to give a still figure of a runner or pitcher or point guard so many of the markers of movement that it might trick the brain into thinking it’s seeing what it knows to be impossible. To suggest, for example, that the enormous statue of Dirk Nowitzki that now stands outside the American Airlines Center in Dallas could really be leaning back into a jumper, fading away so convincingly that you might even anticipate it landing in a soft backpedal.

“Like it’s a giant feather in the middle of the air, and not 1,500 pounds of bronze,” Omri Amrany, the sculptor behind the statue—and a great many in the NBA world—said by phone recently.

When Amrany—with his wife, Julie Rotblatt Amrany—designed the now-legendary statue of Michael Jordan that soars through the lobby of the United Center, he accentuated the perfect balance of the triangle that was always there in Jordan’s “Jumpman” pose. When he created a monument of Shaquille O’Neal that now dunks on a rim outside Crypto.com Arena, he wanted fans to be drawn in to look up at the statue from underneath it, and yet intimidated by the physical presence of Shaq, weighing a literal ton, hanging over their heads. In capturing Dirk, Amrany pushed the angle of Nowitzki’s signature fadeaway to a point that almost felt impossible.

“When it’s up there in the air, it takes away from the brain the feeling that this is a human being,” Amrany said. “It becomes like a flying object.”

Depending on your angle, you can now see Nowitzki shoot over the top of high-rise apartment buildings, luxury hotels, and the most towering fixtures of the Dallas skyline. These sorts of monuments are a rare gesture—there are only about 16 true, full-body statues of NBA stars in the cities where they played—but Nowitzki had an exceptional career worthy of exceptional recognition. Beyond the revolutionary shooting, the open-and-shut Hall of Fame case, and the title Dirk brought to the city in 2011, he also holds a record that may never be broken: an entire, 21-season career spent with a single NBA team.

“Well,” Nowitzki said after the unveiling ceremony, “we hope Luka can break it.”

Many of the current Mavericks were in attendance when Dirk’s statue was unveiled on Christmas morning, among them 23-year-old megastar Luka Doncic—an all-too-worthy heir of the franchise player mantle. Doncic could be the best basketball player in the world someday, if he isn’t already. Like Dirk, he could be an MVP and a champion, and go down as one of the greatest to ever play the game. And yet the idea of Luka having his own statue at the end of his career seems to run contrary to the working reality of the…