Spurs: MANU!!!!!

[ambchang]

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/1...storied-career

The article focused mostly on the passion of Ginobili, and basically spelt out why Manu is my 2nd/3rd favourite NBA player of all time (Behind Robinson, and maybe tied with Elliott).

Every Spur wanted to win, but no one suffered losses harder than Ginobili -- especially when he felt at fault. After Sanchez's team, Panathinaikos, beat Ginobili's in the 2002 Euroleague final, Ginobili didn't leave his house for a week, Sanchez remembers. In Game 7 of the 2006 Western Conference semifinals against Dallas, Ginobili carried San Antonio to a 3-point lead in the waning seconds before inexplicably fouling Dirk Nowitzki on a layup; Nowitzki tied the game, the Mavs won in overtime and Ginobili was inconsolable. He felt he had cost Michael Finley and Fabricio Oberto, the Golden Generation center who signed in San Antonio largely because of Ginobili, their best shot at an NBA le.

Duncan was so worried, he contacted Malik Rose, a former Spur and close friend of Ginobili's, and asked Rose to call and check on him. "I don't say this lightly, but we all told each other: We have to stick with Manu," said Sean Marks, the Nets GM and a Spurs reserve that season. "We had to talk him off the ledge. We had everyone calling, texting, trying to hang out with him."

The grizzled skeptics respected how hot the fire burned in Ginobili even during his rookie season, and they grew to love him for it -- and for the way Ginobili tested the stodgy Popovich. Ginobili plainly did not fit San Antonio. He played with a high-wire flair that ran against the Spurs' slow-paced, low-post, defense-first system.

He shot 3s early in the shot clock, something Popovich didn't tolerate back then, even if players were open. He bounced passes through the legs of defenders, threaded 50-foot bombs in transition, and gambled for steals on defense. Popovich hated it. "I was so stubborn," he said. "I had to rein him in. 'Oh, you can't turn it over. You can't shoot those shots.' All that purist bulls---." He confided one night to Budenholzer: "I don't think I can coach him," Budenholzer remembered.

...


Ginobili kept taking shots out of scheme and lunging around like a fencer for steals. He couldn't help himself. He didn't know it with Popovich yelling at him, but Ginobili was winning the war. "You realized there was more positive than negative," Popovich said. "He's a freaking winner. I came to the conclusion that it had to be more his way than my way."

"He should have been the MVP of that series," Budenholzer said.

"At least co-MVP, with Timmy," Buford added.

He started almost every game he played in 2005, including all seven against Detroit, and flummoxed the league's canniest wing defenders with his syncopated game and bottomless bag of tricks. "People always ask me who was hardest to guard," Raja Bell said. "I say Kobe. That is what people want to hear. But the truth is, it might have been Manu. He'd rev it to fourth gear, get by you, take it back to second gear so you'd run into him, and then he'd make a crazy floater. I made a living studying offensive players. I couldn't figure him out."

By the middle of the 2006-07 season, it was unanimous among the coaches and front office: The Spurs would be better with Ginobili off the bench. There was no way to spread enough touches around to Duncan, Tony Parker and Ginobili when they shared the floor, and San Antonio's offense sputtered when they rested. The coaching staff felt Ginobili, bathed in the Golden Generation's selfless spirit, might accept the bench role more readily than Parker.

"My head failed me for the first time," he said this spring. "I relaxed after Game 5. I felt self-satisfaction. It made me weak. It had never happened. My head was always the thing that drove me."

That will stand regardless of what happens in these Olympics. Argentina is 2-0 in group play after entering as an aging underdog, but where they finish is almost beside the point now. The elders at that London dinner never thought they would be together in Rio. Ginobili recently scanned a photo of him and Scola from their first tournament as teammates in 1996, and thought back to all they had shared over 20 years -- the flights, the meals, the tears, the wine-infused parties.

"Those things matter more than the results," he said.

[Chris]