NBA 2009: Oddly enough, San Antonio Spurs are the best bet for the le
LA Lakers and Boston Celtics are among the favourites, but check out the year and check out Spurs' record.
by Douglas Strother
With the season a little over a month old I find it interesting that many fans and experts are already crowning the Los Angeles Lakers NBA champions for 2009.
Why not? They’ve got out to a quick start, they have the best scorer (not player) in their team, the most successful coach since Red Auerbach, and are the defending Western Conference champions.
But what those same fans and experts seem to be forgetting is that the Lakers were spanked in the Finals by the Celtics last season, showing they can be rattled easily. They haven’t won a championship since Shaq O'Neal donned the purple and gold, and the most obvious reason of all, they would have to stop a succession of championships won by the San Antonio Spurs every odd year since 2003.
In a sporting society where the ‘what have you done for me lately?’ mentality runs rampant, a team like the San Antonio Spurs might fall off the radar after their slow 2-5 start to the season.
The ankle injuries suffered by Manu Ginobili over the summer and then Tony Parker a week into the season, wouldn’t have helped their cause either. But after quick recoveries, both are back, and the best trio in the West are reunited. With a 9-8 record they find themselves only a tiebreaker outside the play-off picture and just two games outside of first place in the Southwest division.
Over the years what has made the Spurs successful is obvious - Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Gregg Popovich. But less credit has gone to the role players, some of whom have come up huge in the play-offs.
Who can forget Robert Horry’s 21-point performance in Game Five of the 2005 NBA Finals against Detroit, or Steve Kerr’s four three-pointers against the Mavericks in Game Six of the 2003 Western Conference Finals, or Malik Rose’s memorable dunk over Dikembe Mutombo to spark a run by the Spurs against the Nets in Game Five of the NBA Finals in 2003.
The Spurs have these role players in the form of Bruce Bowen, Kurt Thomas, Michael Finley and Fabricio Oberto. They won’t exactly set the world on fire, but hey, they are role players. Also, in Ginobili and Parker’s absence, Roger Mason and George Hill became part of the rotation and that experience will have proved invaluable, and Popovich knows he can call on them any time throughout the season. Now put that all together and you have the makings of another championship team.
Admittedly this team isn’t getting any younger. Duncan has been in the league for more than a decade. He’s no spring chicken, but the Celtics taught us a few things about a championship team. One is that three All-Stars isn’t a case of too many cooks in the kitchen; and two, defensive role players are key; and three, age is just a number.
So that just leaves the most obvious question: Just how do they get past the Lakers and the Boston Celtics to achieve championship glory? In the case of the Lakers, last year the Spurs sorely missed a healthy and subsequently quick Ginobili, which usually gives the opposition defense nightmares. That way Parker can play his own game and he doesn’t have to force the issue offensively.
Then, to overcome the addition of Andrew Bynum (who missed the play-offs last season), the Spurs can count on Fabricio Oberto and Kurt Thomas to defend him and leave Duncan to worry about scoring and staying out of foul trouble.
For the Celtics, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett will cancel each other out, and the same goes for Rajon Rondo and Tony Parker. Paul Pierce’s scoring will suffer while he uses his energy defending Ginobili, Ray Allen will find it difficult to score against his arch nemesis Bruce Bowen. Those two have a colourful history, one which Bowen almost always wins.
And besides, all reasons aside, who can forget, it's 2009, an odd year; the year of the Spurs.
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, there might not have been any decent bigs winning les in the decade until Duncan and Robinson did it in '99.
