To germany based posters: how popular is Dirk Nowitzksi among the german masses? Is Nowitzski a household name or is his recognition limited to the basketball community?
All young people know him, the older ones rather not. A Sports Channel reports almost daily about Nowitzki and the Mavericks. Meanwhile also a big channel reports about him in their regular news (at least in the playoffs), so his popularity also among older people will increase soon. Additionally he is having some commercials lately (Sprite and a bank house). In the off season I think he'll be invited to some really big TV shows (I especially think of Europe's most popular show that more than every fifth German watches regularly) to even increase his popularity, but it can very well be that Nowitzki doesn't want to go there to avoid getting in the focus of the German public even more.
Schumacher is the biggest of them all. The media focus mainly on him at every F1 race and in the pre and after race reports. He's got lots of fans and is known by practically everyone in the country. Commercials are plenty, e.g. shampoo, FIAT, Shell, marmelade, etc. Ballack IMO is rated above Nowitzki as well. Problem is that he is a team player and everyone knows that the team has guys like Kahn, Deisler, Scholl, etc who also are very good. As Dallas is far away and not everyone familiar to basketball, they can at least pretend that Nowitzki is more or less everything Dallas has to offer; this of course creates kind of a legend although Nowitzki does everything to reject this view. But as soccer clearly is more popular than basketball, Ballack still rates higher than Nowitzki. Ballack has little commercials IIRC - actually a computer game is all I remember.
When I was in Germany two years ago I was surprised to actually see a few basketball courts. Also, not everyone knew who Dirk was, but I was talking to some people about basketball and they knew who he was. I have heard that basketball is the second biggest sport in Europe nowadays.
This is very difficult to say for Germany. Individual sports always have a special position - as in every country such sports depend on the success of domestic stars. Formula One is very big in Germany since Michael Schumacher, cycling is big with Jan Ulrich and Erik Zabel, ski jump with Martin Schmidt and Sven Hannawald, but this will change as tennis got a small sports since Boris Becker and Steffi Graf retired. A real comparison can only be done with team sports I think. American Football has a special status due to the short season, but NFL Europe attracts more than 30.000 in the average, which actually is more than soccer, but of course it would be different if they played a season as long as soccer. The typical team sports over here are basketball, hockey and handball. I'd say that hockey is the number two behind soccer - two teams have more than 10.000 in the average and more and more high tech arenas are built especially for this sports. This still is a problem in basketball that just has a 3.500 average, although single events like the All Star Game fill a 18.500 arena. Handball is rather a rural sport of regions where you can't find successful soccer teams - it's a village indoor arena filler, but it's not especially popular in bigger cities. Basketball is on a good way to shoot handball to no.4 in the popularity I think
I bet Nowitzki is popular in Dallas.. there cant be many 7 foot tall germans walking around the place.
He is very popular among Mavericks fans....I am not a Mavs fan, but he has been one of my favorite players for years, and I hope he wins it all.
Good. I hope it gains more popularity in Europe, because players there are better trained than they are here. Nowadays, players only learn how to dunk here. The European players are a lot more fundamentally sound than American players as a whole.
I always found it interesting that Real Madrid also won more European titles(basketball) than any other European clubs.
The kids are playing basketball a lot. When I went to school we already played more basketball than soccer in P.E. (which was bad for me regarding the sports and my size of 5'11" ). There will be some more German NBA players in the future I think.