Reply With Quote
I like the comparison to '03 in that it had been 4 years since our first le and people were beginning to openly wonder if the Spurs could do it again. But there are certainly other reasons to be optomistic.
The 2011 Duncan, if healthy, should be a stronger overall player than Robinson was in '03. David's back really limited him that year. He only managed 7.8 pts and 6.6 RPG in about 23 min per game in the post season. Even though his defense was still strong, he couldn't, and didn't play as much that season as people seem to remember. Duncan, on the other hand, will likely be somewhere around his playoff numbers from the last couple of years of 19 pts and 10 boards. My hope is that Splitter rounds into form and can perhaps be a 10 and 7 guy by the post season and provide some size and youth on the defensive end. Blair, IMO, has more upside than Malik did...we'll see how the season progresses, and Dice is definitely playing a bigger and better role than KWill did in that '03 season. Willis was more of an enforcer in the playoffs, only getting about 5 MPG. McDyess serves a much larger role for the Spurs. Bottom line, Duncan is still Duncan. Even if he's 80% of the player he was in 2003 from an athletic ability standpoint, when the post season rolls around there's no one better, or smarter, that you could have anchoring the paint. I'll go out on a limb and say the rest of the supporting bigmen have the potential to be more productive, as a whole, than what we got out of the aging Robinson, Kevin Willis and Malik Rose. Time will tell.
And I'd take the 2011 version of Parker and Ginobili, again if healthy, than the 2003 versions. Manu was still figuring out the NBA that year, he hadn't emerged. Parker was blossoming, but his game, too, hadn't developed to the point it's at today.
Stephen Jackson and Bruce Bowen were really the other two impact players on that 2003 championship team, with some long range shooting (but nothing else) from Steve Kerr thrown in for good measure. Now the Spurs have Richard Jefferson, George Hill, Gary Neal and James Anderson. Offensively, I don't think there's a dropoff at all. In fact, this group probably can, and hopefully will, produce at a higher level. It will just take people getting hot at the right time in the post season. What this team doesn't have, as others have stated, is that defensive stopper. Bruce was a key ingredient to those '03, '05 and '07 championship teams that the Spurs have been missing these last three years. If you can't make stops in the 4th quarter of playoff games you're not going to win very many of them. I don't know how the Spurs will compensate for that, as it seems they've been trying for a couple of years now to figure out how to replace that key component to the championship recipe.
I think the other major obstacle to the Spurs 2011 championship hope will be overcoming the Lakers, Heat, Celtics and Magic of the league. I think all of those teams are potentially better than what the '03 team had to face. The league has become far less balanced, with just a few elite teams now sitting at the top and a whole bunch of wannabes wallowing at the bottom.
That being said, I think this Spurs team has great potential, more than any team since that last championship group in '07. If they can gel, and play well together, I think they have a shot a winning it all. Winning an NBA le seems to be half personnel and half matchups and good fortune. So we'll see...should be a fun season.
