Kawhi

[Kyle Orton]

muh moral victories

[Kyle Orton]

As for Kawhi...

I can't even... he put on a masterful performance... it just fell shy because the Grizzlies hit a lucky shot at the end... (Marc Gasol shot that with his palm...)

I remember two first round series in which the Spurs lost games on last second shots (Suns '03 / Mavs '14) and the Spurs' seemed to do ok...

What does surprise me is how often the Spurs are on the wrong side of unprecedented situations... and get screwed by the decision-making of the officiating crews or league decisions...

2006 vs. the Mavericks (WCSF): Timmy fouls out of a game by being pushed into Dirk from behind by Dampier - Dirk actually steps on Duncan's foot... but Duncan gets assessed for the foul. Anybody else remember the Mavs getting 50 free-throws in Game 1? Or how about Duncan being deliberately hacked by Dampier on the final putback attempt in Game 7? And still... no whistle.

2008 vs. the Lakers (WCF): The league schedules Game 1 of the WC Finals as an early start even though the Spurs had been held up in New Orleans after beating NOH on the road in Game 7. They didn't arrive in LA until 5 am on May 20th... Game 1 on the 21st at 6:00 pm. The Spurs actually start strong but can't maintain their legs. Kobe and Fisher are allowed to beat up Tony and Manu on their way to a Game 1 win. Then in Game 4 the league assigns recently re-instated Joey Crawford to officiate a Spurs game (to make a point that there was no conflict of interest with his return to the league given the reason for Joey's departure). On the game's most pivotal play, Joey swallows his whistle (Fisher jumps on Brent Barry's back on a last second three point attempt that would've given the Spurs a chance to tie [yes Barry traveled on the play but one had to see that clip in real slow motion to even identify the violation... the foul however was OBVIOUS and should have been called]). Earlier that year NBA Commissioner, David Stern, goes on record saying that his dream Finals would be Lakers vs. Celtics... He got his wish...

2012 vs. the Thunder (WCF): Game 5 and Game 6 were so horrifically officiated I can't even recall how many goal-tending calls Ibaka got away with. Anybody else remember a nullified 3 pointer by Ginobili because they called an off-the ball foul AFTER Ginobili's shot went in... what would've been a go-ahead basket? Then there was Parker who fouled Westbrook on a pivotal layup except Parker never even touched him... a review of the play shows that the whistle was blown before Westbrook even jumped towards the hoop. Those last two games reeked of being rigged.

2013 vs. the Heat (NBA Finals): Everybody will rightfully remember Ray Allen's shot to force OT in Game 6. What they won't remember was Allen traveling on the shot. Or that he stepped out of bounds (right in front of the ref) two possessions prior (which resulted in points for the Heat prior to Kawhi's free-throw miss). Most egregiously of all, no one remembers the fact that Joey Crawford denied the Spurs a chance to catch the Heat flat-flooted after the euphoria of Allen's shot. Ginobili had a streaking Kawhi and would've inbounded the ball behind Rashard Lewis (who would've been behind the play) INSTEAD Joey Crawford stops the game (actually pulls the ball from Manu's hands) to check whether or not Ray's shot was a three or a two... everybody and their momma knew that Allen was behind the 3-point line when he shot that - that part of the shot wasn't even debatable. Popovich is shown on the sidelines furiously yelling something along the lines of "You can't f****** do that!!!" repeatedly at Crawford - who simply smirks back. On the next play, the Heat NOW with a set defense, Chris Bosh fouls Danny Green on a last second attempt - no whistle...

2015 vs. the Clippers (1st round): The Spurs end up as a 6th seed despite having better record than the 4th seeded Blazers. End up with a horrible match up against a streaking Clippers team. It's a fairly officiated series. With one really odd play (again a situational oddity that ends up screwing the Spurs). In the waning moments of Game 7, one of the officials allows the Spurs to set up their play and then "manually" stops the game clock with a device behind his back - giving the Clippers a preview of the play. Rivers makes an adjustment, makes a quick sub - the Spurs aren't allowed to draw up another play - Matt Barnes "reads" the play and intercepts the pass to Kawhi. Setting up the OT.

2016 vs. the Thunder (WCSF): Dion Waiters fouls Ginobili before inbounding the ball in the waning moments of Game 2... the Spurs manage to take possession of the ball on Waiter's badly thrown inbounds (Durant slips), Patty misses in the scramble, but Aldridge is fouled on his putback attempt (no whistle). The whole play should've been rendered moot and Ginobili granted free-throws. Later that series, Adams deliberately trips Danny Green who falls into Durant, Durant gives them the go-ahead points from the free throw line. Next play Spurs miss a shot, and Kawhi tries to purposely foul Westbrook to stop the clock since they are only down 1, but no foul is called - a bewildered Aldridge gets caught flat-footed on defense of the rim - Westbrook And-1 - game over. That whole sequence was crap.

Edit: The reason why I brought all this up was because I saw another such play with less than two minutes left in the recent Game 4 (when the shot-clock failed to reset and Mills rushed his shot). You can't tell me the officials didn't have the authority to stop the game and reset the play. Memphis came back and scored on their end. Do I believe the Spurs will lose the series? No... I do however believe the league is allowing Memphis to be overly physical with the Spurs because they might have a subvert agenda to push for a rematch of the last two NBA Finals - the only team that legitimately stands in the way of that are the Spurs.

Were you sitting in a warm tub with a razor in arm' reach while typing this post?

[Phenomanul]

Were you sitting in a warm tub with a razor in arm' reach while typing this post?

LOL no...

It's just ridiculous to me when other fans complain somehow the Spurs are 'league darlings,' when clearly the Spurs have been on the wrong end of the league's decisions more oft than not...

[Thomas82]

I just googled it and found out Manu Ginobili was out for the season starting April 5 in 2009.

We can attribute that to why Spurs got bounced in the 1st round vs Dallas.

That was a major factor. If I'm not mistaken, he was out to start the next season and missed a big chunk of it.

[spurs1990]

LOL no...

It's just ridiculous to me when other fans complain somehow the Spurs are 'league darlings,' when clearly the Spurs have been on the wrong end of the league's decisions more oft than not...

Yes God forbid you post that on an internet website with the URL 'Spurstalk.com'.
Please limit all posts shedding positive light on this NBA team to the reddits, realgms, and insidehoops of the world.

That was a major factor. If I'm not mistaken, he was out to start the next season and missed a big chunk of it.

I feel I need to relinquish my fan card if that entire 2008-2010 Spurs era is a total blank to me.
I absolutely remember the euphoria of #4 in 2007 and that ridiculous stellar regular season in 2011, but in between it's a struggle!

[DMC]

I'm not the religious kind, tbh, but we're going to need some divine intervention to get there...

We'd need someone with a ball bat who can swing it. Where's Tanya Harding's bf?

[DMC]

Were you sitting in a warm tub with a razor in arm' reach while typing this post?

Shavin' his ?

[BD24]

Too bad he's surrounded by .

TBH

[gambit1990]

last year i kept insisting that the ball should in his kawhi's hands more than parker's...

parker fans then: " you're stupid, he's not lebron "

[TheDoctor]

KAWHI LEONARD 2016 - 2017	MPG	FG%	3P%	FT%	PPG	RPG	APG	BPG
PLAYOFFS	37.2	57.6	54.2	97.9	31.6	5.4	3.8	0.2

[Joseph Kony]

Isn't kawhi shooting a ridiculous TS% around 75% or something? He has easily been the best player in the western playoffs thus far

[ElNono]

Isn't kawhi shooting a ridiculous TS% around 75% or something? He has easily been the best player in the western playoffs thus far

but Westbrook triple-doubles

[TheDoctor]

LINK:

Is SPURS' Kawhi Leonard the Quiet Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant?


Sam Gardner Sam_gardner
Apr 27, 2017 at 10:20a ET

Russell Westbrook and James Harden have dominated the MVP discussion for most of the 2016-17 season, and though the Oklahoma City triple-double machine Westbrook will be watching the rest of the playoffs from afar after Tuesday’s season-ending loss to Harden’s Rockets, the NBA’s top scorers are still thought to be in a two-man race for the prize thanks to their impressive individual accomplishments on the offensive end of the floor.


As a result, Kawhi Leonard’s career season has gone largely overlooked, at least in the context of the expected MVP tally. Despite being the NBA’s pre-eminent perimeter defender and arguably the league’s best two-way player, the San Antonio star, who is averaging 31.6 points and holding opponents to 29.4 percent shooting on jumpers longer than 15 feet through Game 5 of the Spurs’ first-round series against the Memphis Grizzlies, figures to be on the outside looking in when the winner is announced June 26.

Fortunately, the 25-year-old Leonard is accustomed to being glossed over. Slighted in high school and underappreciated by the masses in college, the San Antonio cornerstone has spent most of his six-year pro career gradually filling out his game amid little fanfare, a trademark of the franchise he represents. But those who know the two-time defending defensive player of the year best are confident that his time in the spotlight is coming, even if basketball’s next big star would just as soon remain in the shadows.
“Show me a better player,” Leonard’s high school coach, Tim Sweeney, challenged me Wednesday by phone from Leonard’s alma mater, Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, Calif. “It’s not to take away from Harden or Westbrook or LeBron (James), because they’re unbelievable. But to me — and this is not because I’m his high school coach — the best player in the NBA is Kawhi Leonard, all around. He plays defense and offense at a level that nobody else in the NBA is doing.


“He’s just amazing,“ Sweeney continued of Leonard, who spent two seasons playing for Sweeney at King. “He continues to amaze me every day with the way that he continues to grow. And he’s only 25. I think you’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg with the level of greatness this kid is beginning to show. Is he possibly the quiet Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant? Is that what we’re looking at? We can’t answer that right now, but it certainly looks like he’s headed that way.”


One of the most accomplished coaches in the Inland Empire, Sweeney is the son of a Hall of Fame high school coach and says he knew immediately that he had someone special when Leonard transferred to King from Canyon Springs High School in nearby Moreno Valley, going so far as to describe Leonard as a future NBA All-Star in conversations not long after he arrived on campus.


That debut season, as a junior, Leonard led the Wolves on a deep playoff run, despite losing his father in a shooting in January 2008, less than two months before the team’s loss to Compton powerhouse Dominguez in the SoCal regional championship. By then the previously unheralded Leonard was already firmly on the recruiting radar at San Diego State, the first to offer Leonard a scholarship, but the assumption was that other larger programs would soon follow in droves.



Jake Roth/Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports

“You watched him play and he was long-armed, and had the biggest hands of any player I’ve recruited or seen since Chris Webber — huge hands, and every ball that came to his area, he got,” former Aztecs coach Steve Fisher told FOX Sports this week. “And he had the ability to get balls out of his area, you noticed that immediately.


“He was also a guy that could finish off the bounce,” Fisher continued. “You’d get in traffic, and he had a knack for scoring the ball. He was an OK perimeter shooter — not a great perimeter shooter — but he just did things so effortlessly and instinctively that you said, ‘He’s a player,’ and we felt that way from the moment we saw him.”


Leonard had his sights set on UCLA, and Sweeney says he had Leonard “signed, sealed and delivered” to then-Bruins coach Ben Howland. However, Sweeney claims that jealousy over Leonard’s success during a brief AAU stint with L.A. Dream Team in the summer of 2008 ultimately led to Leonard falling out of favor with some of the area’s more high-profile universities.


“Kawhi outshined Renardo Sidney and everyone on the team,” Sweeney said, referencing the troubled former McDonald’s All-American, who was coached by his father, Renardo Sr., and later played at Mississippi State before going undrafted in 2012. “The Sidney group all of a sudden was badmouthing him around everybody, OK? Everybody kind of bought in it, and all these big-time schools — which were probably about eight or 10 of them — dropped off. They literally dropped off the face of the map.”


Calls to a Las Vegas number listed for Sidney were not immediately returned, but Fisher and San Diego State assistant Justin Hutson, Leonard’s lead recruiter, each said they were not aware of any mudslinging by players or coaches from L.A. Dream Team.


“Absolutely not, no,” said Fisher, who retired earlier this month after 18 seasons and eight NCAA tournament appearances at SDSU. “I don’t think that played a role in it at all.


“He was recruited by high, high majors in the power-five leagues, but he wasn’t really, really recruited, and there’s a difference,” Fisher continued. “They would say, ‘Well, I don’t know if he’s big enough to be an inside player and I don’t know if he’s quite skilled enough to be a perimeter player,’ and we just hoped that they would continue to think that.”


“The truth is that he started out with a really good program called Team Eleate and I remember watching him playing in the spring going into his senior year, and he was really good,” added Hutson, who returned to the San Diego State bench in 2013 after two years at UNLV. “We had already turned up the heat at that time, and then he moved over to a little bit more of a national program and he was playing really good for that program also, in front of everybody. It was just a matter of we wanted him and he wanted us.”


To be sure, San Diego State’s early commitment to Leonard played a huge role in his eventual decision to sign with the Aztecs. In 2009, Leonard’s mother, Kim Robertson, spoke with the San Diego Union-Tribune and recalled a conversation in which Leonard told her that once he decided on SDSU, it was “too late” for bigger schools to woo him away, adding, “We never talked about it again.”


“We did our due diligence and we worked him hard, hard, hard,” recalled Fisher, who previously recruited Webber and the rest of the “Fab Five” to Michigan during his nine-year stint in Ann Arbor in the 1990s. “We use the analogy that they wanted to go on a date but weren’t ready to get married to him. We wanted him. We were ready for the marriage to happen.
“And his mother was a huge piece to the commitment to us,” Fisher added of Robertson. “She trusted us, she believed in us, and Kawhi was even more shy then than he is now, and he’s just starting to come out with a willingness to accept some of the spotlight.”


Once on campus at Montezuma Mesa, Leonard quickly developed into the star the program always expected him to be, leading the Mountain West in rebounding while leading the Aztecs to the NCAA tournament for the first time in four years as a freshman. The following season, Leonard’s last with the program, the Aztecs earned a No. 2 seed in the dance — the best in program history — before ultimately falling to the eventual champs, Connecticut, in the Sweet 16.


“He didn’t say very much, but he didn’t have to,” Fisher said of Leonard’s impact on the program during his time in San Diego. “He showed up every day ready to go to work. He loved being in the gym, he practiced the way he wanted to play. You didn’t have to worry about his motor, taking a day off, not being engaged. He was a guy who everybody knew, when practice was over, he’d find his way into a gym to get extra practice in on his own. He was a leader by example.”




A 2011 draft day trade to San Antonio, however, took Leonard out of the spotlight — which Sweeney says was actually exactly what Leonard needed as he settled into the NBA.


“I was just ecstatic,” Sweeney said of the deal, in which the Indiana Pacers acquired George Hill. “Because to be with Coach (Gregg) Popovich, to be able to grow under Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, that was the best thing that could have happened to that kid. It allowed him to learn from three Hall of Famers, allowed him to be able to grow at a pace that was going to be good for him.


“He chose the right place to come in high school, he chose the right place at San Diego and he’s been very blessed to be able to get to the Spurs,” Sweeney continued. “Because it’s allowed him to develop into this monster on the court.”

Wesley Hitt

But whereas Westbrook, Harden, James and other NBA superstars seem to embrace their superstar status, Leonard shies away from the notion, and just this week brushed aside praise from Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley, who described Leonard as the second-best player in the world. Although with the benefit of hindsight, the problem may be that Shaq and Chuck undersold him.


“He’s family to me, so of course, I’d pick Kawhi over anybody,” Hutson said. “Obviously there are some really good players out there, and there’s going to be a handful that you can’t go wrong with. But I’m going to put my money on Kawhi every time.”


Regardless, Leonard won’t be able to remain in the shadows for long. As Leonard’s offensive skillset has caught up to his defense, many have come around on Leonard as the model for future pros to emulate. And with time, the awards the new face of the Spurs is currently being snubbed for will follow, too — whether the notoriously modest Leonard wants it.
“When you play for an organization like San Antonio, at times you’re understated a little bit, nationally, because they’ve been so good for so long,” Fisher said.

“But I think if you do your part, as an individual, and do it again and again and again, everybody takes notice. Would we love to see him become league MVP? Absolutely. Will he this year? Probably not. But will he in time? Probably.”

[Brazil]

I'm far from new...been on this board before even you I'm sure...but I'm a SPURS fan...I loved many and parker back in the day...but they are hurting the team right now...should we keep them on the team forever because they won championships for us? Smh...player fans...

Speaking of ST old fart dumbasses tbh...



u should have stayed retired from this board, ty takes piling on even more ty takes... Smh

[spursistan]

I'm calling it: he's going to average 5 Assists per game next season assuming he plays = or > 34 MPG..His play making has taken a leap as the season progressed..

[TheDoctor]

I'm calling it: he's going to average 5 Assists per game next season assuming he plays = or > 34 MPG..His play making has taken a leap as the season progressed..

Shooters need to make their shots first.

[mystargtr34]

I think kawhi goes to 4+ assists next season which'll be enough to get that media 'makes his teamates better' hype.. put that with 25 ppg 6-7 Rebs and all world D I think he becomes the MVP front runner early on and has a good chance to win it

[Galileo]

Great one minute of video (starting at 4:31) showcasing Leonard's worth.

Anyone else notice how much Chuck and Westbrick look alike? I want to see a DNA test.