We need more of thei from Parker [Archive]

Jimcs50

05-27-2014, 01:37 PM

Don't know if anyone posted this article, but here it is.

Yankees of the NBA? Spurs make contending look easy
Posted May 26, 2014 11:12 AM

San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt could have poured a celebratory beer over the Larry O'Brien trophy last June. He was that close.

"Game 6, my son and I are sitting on the front row," Holt recalled Sunday. "There's that 28 seconds, we're up five points, or whatever. And they bring out the trophy -- five seats from us. And it's sitting there. Then they bring out the rope. So we're sitting there, and we're intently watching the game -- but we're also looking at this trophy. Now, we'd been there before, thank God.

"But then, it does what it does."

"It" was the unspooling of a season's worth of sweat and sacrifice in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals. It was Danny Green shooting out of his ever lovin' mind for five Finals games, of Kawhi Leonard sticking like flypaper to LeBron James, of Manu Ginobili finding, somehow, one more great game in his then 35-year-old body to all push San Antonio to a 3-2 series edge.

"It" was the snatching of what would have been the unlikeliest yet most cherished of titles, for a team well on the back nine of its title run. If Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich had ridden off into the South Beach sunset after winning their fifth ring together, what better way for them to go out?

But Ray Allen happened, and Game 7 happened, and the Spurs had to, somehow, get off the deck. By now, you know much of the story, how Popovich made them get it all out into the open and out of their system during training camp, how they talked over and over about what went wrong in Game 6. And how it has served as a catalyst for their stirring 2013-14 season, with a 62-20 record.

Still ... even a team as mentally strong as the Spurs had to wonder, at some point: How do we recover? How do we find our voice again?

"I think I thought that earlier in the summer, after the seventh game," Holt said. "Just worried about overall morale, for everybody. The whole organization. The office was down. We were bummed out. The whole city was somewhat bummed out ... as we started to get into training camp, Pop got out of his funk. Everybody got out of their funk."

Eight months later, the Spurs are two wins away from getting another date with the whale.

Sunday's Game 3 loss to the Thunder in the Western Conference finals only accented how hard a road San Antonio still faces, and how necessary returning to The Finals would be to a team that already has four rings.

"From Day One, Pop was animated," Spurs point guard Tony Parker said last week. "All we want to do is get back to The Finals and have a chance to redeem ourselves."

The Spurs do not need a fifth ring to validate their status as one of the two most dominant teams of the last two decades (the Lakers' five rings during that period being one better). They have made themselves into the NBA's premier franchise, though, ring counts be damned. No, nobody else had Duncan to build around, but there have been great players, Hall of Fame players, on many teams over the years. Maybe no one had the juice that Popovich has had, his voice carrying like Bob Sheppard's at Yankee Stadium.

Number 21...Tim Duncan ... number 21.

It's an apt comparison. The Spurs are the NBA's version of the New York Yankees -- an irony, considering that the Spurs have always remarked how much more popular a team they'd be if they played in Gotham rather than San Antonio.

Yet the comparisons between Popovich, Spurs GM R.C. Buford, Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, and with Joe Torre, Yankees GM Brian Cashman, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera are startling.

Each quintet was the spine of four championship teams, the stability on the court and on the field and the unquestioned authority of the coach/manager allowing the three superstar players to lead and dominate their positions.

There were Jeter and Duncan, both reluctant to speak publicly, yet who were the unquestioned leaders of their teams, the players everyone else looked to in moments of crisis to bring their Hall of Fame best. (Duncan won two NBA Most Valuable Player awards, while Jeter, somewhat surprisingly, never won baseball's regular-season MVP award, and won just one World Series MVP, in 2000.)

There were Parker and Posada, playing the toughest positions -- point guard and catcher -- in their sports, while playing through injuries and becoming wiser and sharper with age.

There were Ginobili and Rivera, legends in their respective nations, the ultimate closers in their sports.

And there were the championships: four in eight years for the Spurs, four in five years (1996-2000) for the Yankees. Then came excruciating defeats in the search for a fifth championship, both coming on the road, both coming with the Spurs and Yankees holding 3-2 series leads.

The Yankees fell to the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 7 of the 2001 Series, having captured much of the nation's goodwill seven weeks after Sept. 11 -- with Rivera, as automatic a closer as the game has ever known, getting touched up for the tying and winning runs in the bottom of the ninth.

The Yankees, though, kept going back for more. They lost the '03 Series to Florida, famously blew a 3-0 lead to the Red Sox in the '04 American League Championship Series, and lost three straight Division Series matchups before finally coming back for that fifth, last title, in 2009, beating the defending champion Phillies. At the time, Rivera was 39; Posada 37, Jeter, 35.

Today, Duncan is 38, Ginobili 36, Parker 32. They don't yet have that fifth ring, but they are there, again, years after Parker famously believed they were down to their last strike.

The great teams, as Chris Webber put it so smartly a few years ago, aren't great as much as they are stubborn. They may lose, but they come back, year after year, resiliently and relentlessly.

The great franchises don't overreact to one bad playoff series, or a key injury. They reinvent themselves, over and over, as the Spurs have, going from a stifling defensive team when Duncan and David Robinson patrolled the paint to a freewheeling team that must play with pace and ball movement to win.

Popovich insists he has almost nothing to do with it.

"I think it's totally dependent on the character and the quality of the players' mindsets," he said. "I can't will that onto somebody. Sure, I'm a maniac, and I'm going to stick to it, because I'm just built that way. Could be right, could be wrong, I don't know. I'm not out there playing every day. To find 10 or 12 guys that can have that mindset -- and it doesn't mean you're gonna go win a championship, you don't know what's going to happen.

"But to have that dedication and that fortitude to come back and try to be the best team you can be by playoff time, it takes character and mental toughness. And that's all embodied in the players you have."

Duncan is nothing like the force he used to be in the paint. But he's still effective, having developed a jumper over the last few seasons that gives him another weapon as his legs have gone. The Spurs try to get him on the move now as much as possible, knowing he can't dominate in the post like he used to.

And yet, he occasionally still can summon some special nights, as with his Game 1 performance against OKC, when he dropped 27 points in 29 minutes.

"Just mentally, he's a really mentally tough individual, who really feels a responsibility to help carry the program," Popovich said. "He really loves being at practice, in the locker room, with the guys. And I think he wants to extend that as long as he can. And I think it's a mental toughness that he's driven to do that. So I think all those things together allow him to play at this age on one leg."

Seemingly every year, the Spurs find another guy who winds up contributing major minutes in a title run. One year it's Jaren Jackson; another year it's Steven Jackson. They get Bruce Bowen from the alphabet soup of basketball's minor leagues, or get a last good season out of Michael Finley. They get the possibilities in Leonard when few others see them. They lose assistant coaches and front-office personnel year after year, yet no one has come close to duplicating the success they've enjoyed.

"R.C. and his guys do a great job checking backgrounds, watching guys practice," Popovich said. "Seeing how they react to coaches. Seeing how they react to teammates. How important practice is to them. All those sorts of things tell you what you're going to get. And you can save yourself a lot of problems by trying to do that work early, rather than get a guy in your program and then you go 'Geez, how are we going to get rid of this guy?' "

The Spurs -- twice -- saw enough in Jackson to make the talented-but-chippy swingman part of their rotation. And yet, his banishment from the Circle of Trust at the end of the 2011-12 season was as swift and brutal as ex-Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson famously cutting running back Curvin Richards after a two-fumble day on the last day of Dallas' 1992 regular season.

Popovich loved point guard George Hill as much as any player he's coached. And yet, when the chance to get Leonard came up, the Spurs pulled the trigger during the 2011 Draft with the Indiana Pacers -- knowing his chance to make an impression in his rookie season would be limited by the certainty of a lockout.

Leonard believed coming out of San Diego State that he'd be able to defend pros immediately. But nothing else came easy or quickly.

No, the Spurs didn't trade for Leonard because he says next to nothing. They traded for him because he believed, in his heart, he would be a great player in the NBA, and everything he did pointed to someone who'd work until he was.

"It was difficult," Leonard said. "Knowing how good a players they are, and how good the Spurs have been, and that Coach Pop was a great coach. Just coming in, it was hard at times, not knowing what he really wanted. I just stuck with it. The guys told me to keep pushing, and I wanted to get better. It just made things easier for me."

Leonard is quiet, but he burns to win, too. He remembers missing that key free throw in Game 6, the one that gave Miami a chance to tie the game on Allen's 3-pointer instead of putting them down four. Parker remembers pulling his hamstring in Game 1. Ginobili remembers an awful Game 7. They all remember everything. Because they know how fleeting success is, and they've gotten a lot more whacks at the piñata than they probably should have.

"We know, probably in sports at any level, and certainly in pro sports, at the level we play at, to have this kind of run is crazy," Holt said. "Seventeen years of 50 [regular-season wins]? I've only had one year that haven't been in the playoffs, that's how spoiled I am. It was my first year. And I thank God for it. Not only because we got Tim, but I was a new owner. And it taught me a lot of things that year. We were 20-62. We were miserable. And it woke me up."

That first year, Holt's kids were 12 and 10.

"I told them we were going to buy into the Spurs," he said. "They were excited. So the end of the year comes, and we're 20-62. And they come in one and they said, 'Dad, mom, can we talk?' So we sit down and talk. And they say, 'Can we sell the Spurs?' And I say, 'What do you mean, sell the Spurs?' And they say, 'Dad, everybody at school thinks you're an idiot. They really think you don't get it.' And they were serious. And they said, 'We try to defend you, but we're wondering, too.' "

It is so, so hard to win in this league. The Spurs only make it look easy.

DRIBBLES