On April 9, 2019, Dirk Nowitzki played what would be his final home game for the Dallas Mavericks. The night already belonged to him, but Luka Doncic made sure it became a little more symbolic. The rookie scored 30 points and recorded a triple-double, while Nowitzki also finished with 30 points. At the final buzzer, the two Slovenian stars embraced at midcourt.

It felt like a clean passing of the torch. Nowitzki had spent 21 seasons building the Mavericks into his franchise. Doncic was supposed to carry that identity forward.

Seven years later, that simple picture looks very different. Doncic is now preparing for another season in Los Angeles after transforming his body and becoming the Lakers’ clear offensive centerpiece, while Nowitzki is slowly finding his way back toward the Mavericks after admitting he once pulled away from the organization. “He looked clean. He looked tan. He looked slim. He looked ready to go,” Nowitzki said of Doncic. And when asked about his own relationship with Dallas, he was just as direct: “Well, everybody knows that I pulled back there for a while. There were some things done that I didn’t agree with, and I kind of just pulled back from the franchise.”

That makes Nowitzki’s latest comments about Doncic more interesting than a simple reaction to a slimmer frame. The former Mavericks icon is watching his old protégé continue to reinvent himself in Los Angeles at the same time that he is deciding whether Dallas is finally becoming an organization he can reconnect with.

The change in Doncic’s appearance did not come out of nowhere.

After his February 2025 move from Dallas to Los Angeles, Doncic began a major overhaul of his approach to conditioning. The first major phase of that transformation was reported to have taken place during the summer of 2025, when he lost about 31 pounds while reducing gluten and refined sugars and putting a greater emphasis on lean protein.

The work continued into the following offseason. By the summer of 2026, reports placed his cumulative weight loss at about 38 pounds, or 17 kilograms, while his training included intensive work in Croatia and Slovenia. The goal was not simply to look different when he stepped onto the court. Doncic himself framed the process around taking better care of himself and continuing to improve.

“Obviously, be the best that I can be, take care of myself. This year, with my team, I think we did a huge step. But this is just the start, you know. I need to keep going. Can’t stop.”

There was also something important about what did not change.

Doncic remained one of the NBA’s most productive players after arriving in Los Angeles. In 2025-26, he averaged 33.5 points, 7.7 rebounds and 8.3 assists in 64 games and won the scoring title. The physical transformation, in other words, did not come at the cost of the offensive game that had already made him one of basketball’s most difficult players to defend.

And that is why Nowitzki’s “ready to go” comment carries more weight than a passing observation about appearance.

Doncic’s change is now moving into another stage. With LeBron James no longer in Los Angeles, this is the first full season in which Doncic enters as the Lakers’ clear offensive centerpiece rather than sharing that role with one of the greatest players in NBA history.

The Lakers have also reshaped the roster around him, including the addition of center Walker Kessler. But perhaps the clearest sign of Doncic’s changing role came away from an NBA game.

From August 20 to August 24, he hosted a four-day Lakers minicamp in Slovenia. He organized workouts at Štožice Arena, helped bring teammates together away from the court and even took the group kayaking on Lake Bled. He also led a team cycling session and hosted other activities during the trip.

It was a different kind of responsibility for Doncic.

The player who once arrived in Dallas as the young star being introduced to Nowitzki was now gathering his own teammates around him and helping set the tone for a new Lakers team.

But while Doncic has been building something new in Los Angeles, Nowitzki has been dealing with something much older.

His distance from Dallas did not begin with the Doncic trade.

In 2021, Nowitzki was brought back into the organization as a special adviser and was involved in the process that led to the hiring of general manager Nico Harrison and head coach Jason Kidd. He tried to stay close to the team, attending practices and offering advice.

Yet the role never fully settled into something that felt natural.

“It felt a little weird to go to the gym every day not knowing my role,” Nowitzki said.

Then came a decision that changed his relationship with the organization.

In August 2023, Harrison dismissed longtime Mavericks head trainer Casey Smith. Smith had been with Dallas since 2004 and had eventually become the team’s director of player health and performance. More importantly for Nowitzki, Smith was a trusted friend who had been part of the former MVP’s career for years.

Nowitzki had credited Smith with helping him remain healthy enough to play 21 NBA seasons.

The circumstances of Smith’s dismissal made the situation even more difficult. ESPN reporting found that Harrison terminated Smith by phone while Smith was in Ohio dealing with his gravely ill mother. Another source described Harrison as being threatened by Smith’s standing within the organization.

For Nowitzki, the decision became a major breaking point.

After Smith was removed, Nowitzki stopped visiting the practice facility.

That detail matters because it changes the way his later reaction to the Doncic trade should be understood. He was not suddenly disillusioned with Dallas because one superstar was traded. His relationship with the organization had already been damaged.

Then Dallas traded Luka.

On February 1, 2025, Harrison sent Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in one of the most stunning trades in recent NBA history.

Nowitzki was traveling when he learned what had happened. He had been on his way to lunch when the news reached him. Instead of going to eat, he returned to his hotel room and sat alone for an hour.

“I was about going to lunch when I heard about it and skipped lunch to sit in my hotel room for one hour… It was insanity.”

For someone who had watched Doncic arrive in Dallas as a teenager and eventually become the face of the franchise, the sight of him leaving was difficult to process.

“I was shocked. Strange and bizarre to see him in purple and gold.”

The trade also changed the way Nowitzki showed up around the Mavericks.

According to Dallas Morning News reporting, he attended only two NBA games during that stretch: Doncic’s Lakers debut in Los Angeles and Doncic’s first game back in Dallas.

Those were not random appearances.

They were the two places where the old Mavericks story and the new Lakers story briefly met.

And that is what makes the relationship between Nowitzki and Doncic so unusual. The two players once represented a seamless transition from one Dallas era to another. By 2025, one had been pushed out of the franchise and the other had largely withdrawn from it.

But Dallas has changed again.

The organization eventually moved on from Harrison after the backlash surrounding the Doncic trade and the disappointing 2025-26 season. In 2026, Masai Ujiri arrived as the new team president, bringing a very different voice into the basketball operation.

Ujiri’s arrival appears to have opened a door that had been closed for years.

Nowitzki has confirmed that he and Ujiri have exchanged “numerous texts” over the summer. That does not mean Nowitzki has agreed to return to the Mavericks in a formal role. In fact, he has made clear that his current commitments make a full-time front-office position difficult.

“It’s hard to predict, especially with the Amazon gig. We do a lot of traveling for that. I was gone for weeks at a time. It’s going to be hard to be full-time, but Masai and I have exchanged numerous texts over the summer. We have some history, so I’m sure as time goes on here, we’re gonna meet up and talk relationship, talk Mavs, and when the time is right, I’m sure we’re going to start that conversation, but as of now, we just exchanged some texts, and that’s really that.”

That last part is important.

There is no official return. There is no confirmed new job. There is no reason to turn a few conversations into something they are not.

But there is also a clear change.

For the first time in years, Nowitzki is talking about the Mavericks in terms of what could come next rather than what went wrong.

His timing is especially interesting because Ujiri has inherited a franchise trying to repair more than its roster. The Mavericks are trying to rebuild their relationship with a fan base that never accepted the way the Doncic era ended, while also establishing a new identity around the next generation of the team.

Nowitzki’s place in that process would be different from that of a normal former player.

He is still one of the defining figures in the franchise’s history. He knows what the organization looked like when it was built around loyalty and continuity. He also knows what it felt like when that connection broke down.

And that is why his conversations with Ujiri matter even if they remain informal for now.

Meanwhile, Doncic is facing his own version of a reset.

He has already gone from Dallas’ young heir to the Lakers’ franchise star. He has changed his approach to his body, won another scoring title and taken a bigger leadership role around a reshaped Los Angeles roster.

Now he enters a season without LeBron James beside him, with the Lakers expecting even more from him.

The contrast is hard to miss.

Doncic is trying to take control of what comes next in Los Angeles.

Nowitzki is trying to figure out whether he can have a place in what comes next in Dallas.

Seven years after that night when the rookie Luka appeared to take the torch from Dirk in Dallas, neither player’s story has followed the path anyone in that arena could have expected.

The handoff happened.

What came after it did not.

And now, as Doncic continues building a new identity in Los Angeles and Nowitzki begins talking to the new leadership in Dallas, the most interesting question may no longer be what either man left behind.

It is whether either side is finally ready to decide what comes next.