Dallas Mavericks – American Airlines Center

Outside the arena in Victory Park stands a bronze figure caught in the act of shooting: one leg kicked out sideways, body tilted away from an imaginary defender, right arm extended high. Anyone who watched basketball in the 2000s recognises the shot before they read the plaque. The Dallas Mavericks American Airlines Center is, more than most buildings in the league, the house that one player built — and Dirk Nowitzki’s fadeaway is the reason.

A red-brick arena in a glass city

American Airlines Center opened in 2001 and is architecturally the odd one out among arenas of its generation. Where its contemporaries reached for glass and steel, Dallas built in red brick and cast stone with four vaulted entrance arches — a deliberately traditional exterior that reads more like a rail terminus than a sports venue. It has aged considerably better than the futurism of the same period.

The arena anchored Victory Park, a development north of downtown that took far longer to fill in than planned and now functions properly as a district. It is shared with the Dallas Stars, which makes the building one of the busier arenas in North America across a winter.

Twenty-one seasons, one uniform

Nowitzki played twenty-one seasons for the Mavericks and no other professional club — a span of loyalty that has become close to impossible in the modern game. He arrived from Würzburg in 1998 as a seven-foot forward who wanted to shoot from distance, an idea the league then regarded as a novelty and now regards as the entire point. Almost every tall player in basketball today is running an offence that Nowitzki made thinkable.

The 2011 championship is the one Dallas replays. The Mavericks beat the Miami Heat side assembled around LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, a team constructed explicitly to win immediately, and they did it with an older roster nobody had favoured. The clinching game was played in Miami, so the celebration came home rather than happening here — but the run that produced it, and the arena’s part in it, is the high-water mark of the franchise and the standard every Finals run since has been measured against.

What it is like inside

The interior is unusually well proportioned. Because it was designed for both basketball and hockey from the outset rather than adapted, the lower bowl sits close to the floor without the awkward gaps that retrofitted arenas carry, and the upper deck is less vertiginous than most. Capacity for basketball runs to a little over twenty thousand.

Dallas crowds have a reputation for arriving late and dressing well, which is largely earned, but the building has a specific and reliable trigger: a close fourth quarter turns it into one of the more genuinely hostile rooms in the Western Conference. The roster churn of recent years has tested the audience’s patience and it has mostly held.

The other team in the building

The Dallas Stars have shared the arena since it opened, and their presence is a reminder of one of the odder achievements in American sport: a hockey franchise, relocated from Minnesota to north Texas in 1993, that won a Stanley Cup within six years and built a genuine following in a state with no natural ice tradition. Youth hockey in Texas grew out of that period, and a Stars night in Dallas no longer feels like an import.

Practically, the shared tenancy means the arena is in use most nights of a Texas winter, and the two seasons overlap almost completely — which makes this one of the easier venues in America at which to see two professional sports in the same week without changing hotel. The building also takes a heavy concert and boxing schedule, and the conversion crews here are quick enough that a hockey game one evening and basketball the next is routine rather than remarkable.

Visiting

Victory Park sits just north-west of downtown Dallas and is reachable on the DART light rail, which drops you a short walk from the doors — a genuine advantage in a city built comprehensively around the car. Parking exists in quantity but the exit afterwards is slow. The bars and restaurants of Victory Plaza handle the pre-game hour, and the Design District immediately west is the better option if you have longer.

For planning around the calendar, our season preview marks the dates that matter and the viewing guide covers everything else.

Twenty-one years is a long time for a building and a player to define each other. Dallas got both, and the statue outside is an honest accounting of the debt. We follow where the league’s next long careers are forming in our basketball coverage.