Continuing my take on the NBA, I feel that tonight is a good night to talk about the Spurs, especially since Pop ruined TNT's potential ratings by sending Tony Parker, Danny Green, Manu Ginobili, and Tim Duncan home early, right before a marquee match-up with the Miami Heat. My first thought? "About time!" I have been waiting for a quirky Popovich story for quite some time now and am glad that he delivered in a big way. Obviously, not everyone was happy about this, but I actually think its both brilliant and hilarious. The reason I like this move by the Spurs is that they know championships are not won on a Thursday night in November. Popovich is thinking long term all the way here, he is absolutely entitled to give his best players a rest if he thinks that they need one. To him, it doesn't matter if they lose an extra regular season game, what matters is that he keeps his players fresh for the games that actually count. Am I a little bit upset that I wont get to watch the best match-up of the year so far? Absolutely. Am I mad at Popovich? Absolutely not, the man is a brilliant coach and people should not be questioning him at this point. As an added bonus, Popovich will get to see what he really has on his roster. He can see if guys like Gary Neal, Cory Joseph, and DeJuan Blair deserve spots in the rotation or not (what better way to evaluate your players than against the defending NBA champions?), and he ultimately may find an x-factor for the playoffs that he didn't know he had.
Now that the major talking point of tonight's game is out of the way I can talk a bit about the Spurs in general. First of all; how are these guys still so relevant? They are winning games and dismantling teams like its 2003 and Tim Duncan has not looked this good in almost five seasons! How good has Duncan been this year? Apart from his numbers being up across the board, he is also top-5 in the league in PER, the go-to formula for evaluating NBA players. Duncan is playing so well that I am beginning to think that he was injured over the past two seasons and was just playing through it. Whatever the case is, if he can maintain this level of performance throughout the season, the Spurs should be considered a serious contender for the title. The more I follow the NBA the more I realize that teams like the Spurs (particularly from 1999 and on) are very rare and it saddens me to know that they can't continue this forever, at least not with this group of players. When was the last time a team in the NBA was picked to 'finally fall off' for almost eight years running and never wavered? Will we ever see another team put together a decade's worth of fifty win seasons, multiple titles, and several great players while flying completely under-the-radar? A team so many people labeled as 'boring' and dismissed them just because ESPN told them to do it, yet even when they give people what they want (a high-scoring Juggernaut that plays beautiful basketball) the people still disrespect them? I realize that most of what I have said does not apply to die-hard NBA fans who take their time and actually watch the games before forming opinions, but these fans are few and far between. So I urge you: forget about your bias, watch this team, and appreciate the things they do, it might be a long time before you see something like them again.
