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Meanwhile the Spurs beat the Suns using small-ball and one their most statistically productive lineups in the playoffs has been: Parker, Ginobili, Bowen, Finley and Duncan.
The Debriefing: The Spurs Do Not Deserve Your Scorn
Posted May 21st 2007 9:00AM by mjd
Filed under: Spurs, NBA Playoffs, Featured Stories
http://www.aolsportsblog.com/2007/05...ve-your-scorn/
As there is with anything or anyone who dares to be great, there's a strong fan backlash against the San Antonio Spurs right now. But it doesn't feel like your normal we're-just-tired-of-them, New England Patriots-style backlash. It's more visceral. It's more hostile.
It strikes me as odd, because before the 2007 playoffs, no one hated the Spurs. They were the Winnie the Pooh of the NBA ... soft and harmless. If you felt anything towards Tim Duncan and his little friends, it was probably some combination of indifference and boredom. Now there's hatred flowing, and even more bizarre than that, there's a belief that they're a dirty team; a team of thugs, a belief that is so far out there. The Spurs are to thuggery as Celine Dion is to thuggery.
I thought maybe we should take a look at the reasons for the brand new animosity, and hopefully discard some of them so you don't have to spend the next two weeks getting a headache every time the Spurs win. From what I can gather, there are seven new reasons for the Spurs hatred. Let's plow through them.
1. Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudemire were suspended. No one likes the cir stances under which the Spurs won Game 5, including the Spurs themselves. I'm sure they'd rather have played the entire series at full strength (they'd have won anyway), and I'm sure they'd rather not deal with anyone putting an asterisk at the end of their win, or seeing the series as somehow tainted.
It's not like P.J. Carlesimo was behind the Suns bench with a cattle prod, jamming it in to the rectal cavities of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw, making them get up and run. And it's not like Francisco Elson is the NBA's punishment czar. It may have been unfair, it may have been unfortunate ... but you can't pin it on the Spurs.
If you want to be mad at the NBA for having a dumb rule, fine, and if you want to get mad at Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudemire for leaving the bench, even better. But even if you think the suspensions were the most heinous thing to happen to basketball since the '98 Knicks, it's still not the Spurs fault.
2. Bruce Bowen is dirty. Well, yes. Bruce Bowen is dirty, maybe the dirtiest of all-time. Even Bill Laimbeer, recognized as the gold standard for basketball filth, did things that were designed mainly to piss people off. Bowen seems intent on actually crippling people.
But why is it just an issue now, when Bowen's been a dirty player for a long time? He kicked Ray Allen in the back, he kicked Wally Szczerbiak in the face, and he's got a long, long, long history of sticking his feet under the feet of jumpshooters returning to the ground.
Bowen had a history, long before he undercut Amare Stoudemire from behind and kneed Steve Nash in the coin purse. But it was just a history of violence, not necessarily a history of fan hatred. Now, all the sudden, he's basketball's Bill Romanowski. It's like getting mad at O.J., but not until he wrote that If I Did It book.
3. Tony Parker is French. You can't hold someone's Frenchness against them. Unless you're Bill O'Reilly.
4. Tim Duncan is a whiner. Duncan does his share of complaining, but if he's going into the "whiner" category, so is 75% of the NBA. Yes, he makes the gigantic "not me!" eyes, and yes, he's always indignant about his purity and innocence. But he's not the screaming and cursing type, he at least always seems respectful of officials and there's only one recorded incidence of an official wanting to fight him.
5. Robert Horry did a terrible thing to Steve Nash. He did. It was a hard and unnecessary foul. But it's not like we're talking about Anthony Mason here ... this is not a guy with "THUG LIFE" tattooed across his abs in big gothic letters. Robert Horry wants to be in a physical altercation about as much as Gregg Popovich wants to sing backup vocals for the Pussycat Dolls.
Horry screwed up on this one play, but what, now we're going to treat him like the next coming of Charles Oakley? Come on. Robert Horry is as harmless as it gets.
6. Fabricio Oberto is ugly.He is VERY UGLY! Oberto could hold an entire 12-pack of Red Stripe and still not be beautiful. But if we're going to hold ugly against people, then Scottie Pippen has to give all his rings back.
7. Manu Ginobili flops and cries. Listen, I hate the flopping, too, but every team has a flopper. Steve Nash flops, Shawn Marion flops, Raja Bell is in the elite class of NBA floppers (Dwyane Wade is still untouchable at the top, though). Flopping is a leaguewide epidemic, and it's not exclusive to the Spurs or the Suns. Maybe Ginobili's among the worst, but he's not alone in this crime.
These are the reasons that come up, but it's that easy to make a similar list about any team in the NBA. I don't want to tell anyone who they can or can't like, but the anti-Spurs sentiment is raging right now when they're the same harmless team they were a year ago.
Which brings us to the real reason people don't like the Spurs, even if they're aware of it or not: the Spurs are the biggest obstacle standing in the way of a small ball revolution.
An inferior brand of small ball just toppled the Mavericks. But the superior brand has never been able to get past the Spurs. It might never be able to get past a smart, defensively responsible team with a truly dominant big man, but after Tim Duncan, how many of those are left?
The Suns, and to a lesser extent, the Warriors, have spoiled us. We all got high on fast breaks, quick shots and huge point totals. And if it wasn't for Greg Popovich's evil creation, we'd all spend our evenings watching James Jones hit open transition three-pointers, eating buckets of ice cream and giggling like four year-olds watching the Muppet Babies while sniffing nitrous oxide.
But that's not the reality. The Suns play their style of basketball, maybe as well as it can be played. And everyone loves them, and everyone loves 220-point games, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Except for the fact that it can't beat the Spurs.
Meanwhile the Spurs beat the Suns using small-ball and one their most statistically productive lineups in the playoffs has been: Parker, Ginobili, Bowen, Finley and Duncan.
hilarious but wrong.It strikes me as odd, because before the 2007 playoffs, no one hated the Spurs. They were the Winnie the Pooh of the NBA ... soft and harmless. If you felt anything towards Tim Duncan and his little friends, it was probably some combination of indifference and boredom.
Am I the only person who thinks Oberto is the opposite of ugly?
I think oberto is normal looking.
But then, I'm not prone to be overly observant of man-looks.
Smart ass cracks on the Spurs. How mature to call Fabricio Oberto ugly.
Last edited by GrandeDavid; 05-29-2007 at 02:52 PM. Reason: editing slang
I don't think he is ugly at all. I always thought he was handsome. Maybe not hunky like Clooney, but definitely handsome.
i just want to know where he gets that string/band to hold back his hair!
uh, the article was actually complimenting the Spurs.
Basically saying those are stupid reasons to hate spurs
Double-doubles from the 5 spot, especially this season, are particularly sexy. Not that I swing that way, and, of course, not that there's anything wrong with that for those who do.
good article
I think the article is right, although the author makes it sound like if there were no Spurs, all the NBA champs would be small ballers. I'm not sure that's so.
The age of big, lumbering centers, a la Shaq, is coming to an end, but that doesn't mean there won't be big lumbering centers to come - , I'm not all that convinced from what I've seen that Greg Oden isn't that type of center - and besides, even with smaller, more athletic centers, I'm not sold on that you can win a 7 game series without a commitment to defense.
Maybe when the NBA switches to the NCAA 1-and-done model of playoffs, then a team like Golden State will win it all. But not till then.
Meanwhile, the problem with the Suns isn't their small ball, it's their lack of commitment to playing D. Amare has the potential to be as good as TD someday - under the right coach. He needs to commit to playing D and grow up emotionally. Will he do that while Nash still has some gas left in him? I don't know. And the Mavs didn't lose because they play small - they lost because they allowed GS to dictate the pace and the tempo, and because Dirk mentally broke down.
Yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself today, trying to post while working. I honestly missed that. My bad.
Did anyone see Parker last night in the first quarter contest a DWill three pointer and come down right beneath his feet, causing him to slightly stumble? This is the same that has happened to Bowen a handful of times. So is Parker dirty, trying to "cripple" people?
No. Dumb people think that a move like that is necessarily dirty. Even dumber people think that a slower guy backing off a quick penetrator and jumping towards them to contest a long jumper is dirty.
Have these people ever played basketball before? I played in high school and college and now lumber up and down the court wheezing once or twice a week. I have had people come down on my feet while I was contesting their jumper probably 5 times that I can remember. Never was I actually trying to "cripple" them, or even get in their head. My feet landed there because that's the place my forward momentum took them. Bowen has played literally THOUSANDS more minutes than I have. And it's happened to him about the same amount.
Where the are people getting this "dirty" from? ing egomaniacs like Ray Allen, Vince Carter, and Stephon Marbury who get owned by Bowen from time to time? They actually TRUST those people's appraisal of Bowen's intent? HAVE THEY CONSIDERED THE SOURCE?
Jesus.
I think he's sexy looking.
As always, when they know all about basketball, they write "People" and Teeny bopper/fan mag gossip .
Did you mean smart-ass cracks or smart ass-cracks?Smart ass cracks on the Spurs. How mature to call Fabricio Oberto ugly.
nice article, the O'Reilly crack turned me off, but other than that, it was well written.
-Mars
Scottie Pippen has to give all his rings back.
;-)
Look at it from the other perspective. There are some SERIOUS uglies in the NBA and Fab ain't even close.
Exactly. I think Fabricio is nice-looking, and I don't think Scottie Pippen is seriously ugly either--not in the class of, say,
AK47
Okur
Deron Williams
and of course, the ever-popular Sam Cassell.
Maybe it's some american thing... Here in Argentina, Oberto is seen as very good looking and sexy and... God! I think I like Oberto....
meh...some good parts...some stupid.
Oberto's a hero in Argentina. Do they think Scola's good looking, too?
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