The Dallas Mavericks are an American professional basketball team in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Mavericks compete in the Southwest Division of the Western Conference of the NBA. Founded in 1980, the Mavericks were a perennial playoff team throughout the 1980s. After that early success, the team went through a period of rebuilding and was one of the worst in the league during the 1990s until the team drafted forward Dirk Nowitzki in 1998. Nowitzki led the team to its first NBA Finals appearance in 2006 in which it lost to the Miami Heat. He then helped to complete one of the biggest upsets in NBA history when the Mavericks beat the Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals.

The Mavericks play their home games at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas. The team has the longest active sellout streak in NBA history. A big part of that is due to the success of the aforementioned Nowitzki. Nowitzki was a 14 time NBA All-Star, 12 time NBA All-Team player, NBA regular season Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 2007, and an NBA Finals champion and MVP in 2011. The team has retired the numbers of Derek Harper, Brad Davis, and Rolando Blackman with Nowitzki’s number 41 soon to follow. The 2010s were an up and down time for the Mavericks.