Spurs old but still in the way in NBA’s West
With four titles in nine seasons, San Antonio is NBA’s team of the decade, and even when it doesn’t win it’s in the mix. Another title run isn’t out of question.
April 13, 2008
The king isn’t dead yet
When was it that the West stopped being a mere conference and became this eight-way steel-cage battle of titans?
It was the fall of 1999, a year after Michael Jordan left Chicago, the season Phil Jackson arrived to turn the Lakers, who had been a circus, into a mighty, feared . . . circus.
The Lakers, en route to their first of three consecutive titles, won 67 games as five more West teams won 50 in what was to become a typical configuration.
The San Antonio Spurs were defending champions that season, as they are this season, nine years later.
New powers like Dallas and Phoenix have risen, old powers like Sacramento and Portland have faded and some like the Lakers and Utah have left and come back.
The Spurs, the lone constant, haven’t gone anywhere.
They won their first title in 1999 when Tim Duncan was 22; their second in 2003 in David Robinson’s farewell; their third in 2005 with a memorable performance by 34-year-old former Laker Robert Horry, and their fourth last season with Duncan at 31, the only player left from 1999.
That made this the Spurs’ era, as surely as the Showtime Lakers’ fourth and fifth titles made the '80s their decade with the Celtics stuck on three.
Of course, the average age of the Spurs’ starters is now 32 and at the moment they’re having trouble scoring 80 points, let alone 90 or 100.
On the bright side, they’ve been doing this for nine years and lived to tell the tale!
“This is the way the West is going to be in coming years too,” Coach Gregg Popovich said last week from San Antonio.
"Seeds don’t mean anything. There are no upsets. Somebody is going to say, ‘The No. 8 seed upset the No. 1 seed’ or ‘The No. 6 seed upset the No. 3 seed,’ but that’s baloney.
“It’s great for the league and the fans. It’s a killer for the coaches. We’re all going to take two years off our life for this season.”
Unfortunately, all the Spurs have gotten nationally is grief about TV ratings. It’s such an industry joke that when ratings cratered for last week’s Final Four in San Antonio, the website Sports Media Watch wrote:
“Perhaps people are just not interested in basketball being played in San Antonio.”
It’s an irony that flows from today’s Internet-cable TV-inspired tabloid journalism: The team that’s so popularly disrespected is the one that’s most admired by its peers.
These days with every owner out to create his own San Antonio, you can’t turn around without bumping into a former Spur.
Phoenix is now run by Steve Kerr, Portland by Kevin Pritchard, Seattle by Sam Presti and Cleveland by Danny Ferry, all former Spurs.
Not that there’s ever likely to be another San Antonio, the grown-up, stand-up, ego-sublimating wonder of its ego-saturated age.
