The NFL season is in full swing, so you might have forgotten that the NBA’s regular season starts in two weeks. With such a short amount of time until games begin to matter, this is not the time of the year when fans want to hear that their team’s star player is having health issues. Unfortunately for Dallas Mavericks’ fans, Dirk Nowitzki’s knee is not being cool. From ESPN:

“I’m doing everything I can not to have surgery,” Nowitzki said Monday after sitting out a second consecutive preseason game due to the knee. “I guess that’s obvious that I really don’t want it done now. If I want to do it, I would love to do it after the season, get through the season somehow, but the swelling came back three or four times now. That’s obviously not good news.

No, that is not good news. Dirk first had trouble with the knee early last season, but he eventually got healthy.

“If it’s going to keep swelling up on me, that’s obviously not a way to go throughout an 82-game season and hopefully long playoff run.”

In fact, I would say that if his knee keeps swelling up he will not go through an 82-game season and there will definitely not be a long playoff run.

“We’re going to see if it gets any better these next couple of days before we do another decision,” Nowitzki said. “That’s really the only update we’ve got. There’s a little swelling in there. It makes no sense at this point of the preseason to play on a swollen knee, so we decided to see what’s going to happen here in the next couple of days.”

If Dirk’s injury persists, who will the Mavs turn to? Elton Brand, O.J. Mayo and Chris Kaman all signed during the offseason, but this remains a Dirk-centric team in an always-deep Western Conference. It could be a long season in Dallas. [ESPN]