Is it okay to recycle material from Twitter? I feel okay stealing other people’s lines, if I positively can’t remember who owns it. There’s a great Coltrane line about tradition as “a big reservoir that we all dip out of.” That’s been reduced to today’s “hive-mind,” and while it makes my skin crawl, it provides all sorts of convenient excuses for an Internet that has gotten almost impossible to track in terms of ownership and originality. Still, I get uneasy at the thought of really using the thing as a notebook, in part because I worry that these days, my web presence amounts largely to Twitter outbursts during NBA playoff games.

However, I’ll break through the pain here, and reiterate this one true thing about Dirk Nowitzki: The Big German, as he’s affectionately known is Dallas, is not Larry Bird.

In the same way that Kobe Bryant was never going to be the Next Jordan, and earned respect only when he grew into the legacy of the First Kobe, Dirk needs to stop being compared to the Hick from French Lick. Sorry if that’s a nickname that makes the Celtics lynch mob call out their dogs; for my purposes, it’s good that it sticks. Because even if Dirk superficially resembles Bird, there’s one key difference: Dirk is German, perhaps the most loaded national identity of the 20th century. And maybe beyond; spend enough time on Twitter, and you’ll read more than a few ham-handed Nazi jokes. If nothing else, the ceaseless impulse to describe Nowitzki as “efficient” goes well beyond percentages and shot charts. It’s a reflex, a prayer, and a joke, roping in Kraftwerk to broaden the scope.

Dirk, a tall, pale-skinned, shaggy-haired forward with oodles of mismatched skills and a sublime shooting touch, sort of looked like Bird. But he descended from the country that, to this day, America can’t consider without silently evoking World War II (to say nothing of the first one). Bird’s sneering pastoralism was never easy to process. And given his dirt-court, straight outta grain-and-tractors Klan country narrative, he was an easy play-thing for basketball conservatism. Folk-ish as they come, so the story goes, Bird took back the game, kept the Lakers at bay. Through no fault of his own, he became a modern-day Max Schmeling (the first time around). Let’s get something straight: I am not calling Bird a Nazi. But his whiteness, or at least what’s been made of it, is loads more problematic than Dirk’s.

Dirk isn’t just white, he’s German. He’s a child of the post-WWII era. More specifically, the world he grew up in was an infinitely apologetic one, when the New Left, hippie-ish penance, and the onset of Euro-trash worked together to soften that country’s image once and for all. When the Berlin Wall came down, it was like Germany deserved it—in much the same way that, when it went up, plenty of people figured that Germany had it coming. A Jewish friend told me recently “Germans are more broken up over the Holocaust than you or I; you end up comforting them.” This is Germany today; this is Dirk’s milieu. Certainly, it’s a long way from the frequently nasty Celtics/Lakers rivalry. If anything—admit it, you never saw this in the hive mind before—Dirk’s supposed lack of a “killer instinct” is as much about what we want Germany to be, and what it has become, as it is a stereotype about European players. For Dirk to find himself, or at least for us to accept him, he had to make us see what German intensity and passion mean. The cliches we have either stamp them with darkness, or brand him as clinical.

Dirk, as we’re seeing, is neither one of these. Comparing him to Larry Bird misses the point, and possibly does both men a disservice. It ignores important boundaries of culture, perhaps makes us see Bird in an unfavorable light, and does nothing to help us resolve our most treasured Teutonic stereotypes. What Nowitzki is doing right now? He’s doing that work for us. His biography, captured in exacting detail in Zac Crain’s oral history for D Magazine, shows you Dirk’s world. Sure, he’s an elite athlete, but Nowitzki is no more divorced from his background than Bird (real or imagined) is. Sally Jenkins’s 1993 Sports Illustrated feature on Boris Becker, another German athlete whose public face often bewildered Americans, shows us that this isn’t the first time this has happened. And Barbara Smit, writing about Helmut Rahn for the Guardian, recounts another major breakthrough in post-war German identity. Is it possible that, fifty years later, Dirk is still working to fix it up for the outside world?