**I was going to wait until after the Finals, if the Spurs win, to write this long, multi-part appreciation to everything Spurs, but why wait? Their accomplishments are already amazing. if they fail to beat the Heat, the two-time defending Champs with one of the 10 best players in NBA history far closer to his prime than the Spurs legend to his, that isn't a failure. The Spurs have already exceeded expectations, again. Let's celebrate them now, let's celebrate the Greatest Franchise of the 2000s, better than the Patriots, Lakers, Heat, Cardinals, Red Sox, Red Wings, Yankees, anyone. No one comes close to what the Spurs have done, win or lose the Finals.**
How to best define what the Spurs just did? There are so many ways, really. It's not only that they've made NBA finals 15 years apart with the same coach and same legendary player. It's not that they repeated trips to the Finals for the first time in their franchises history even as their players got older. It's not that they became the first team since the 1998 Utah Jazz to make it back to the Finals the year after losing it. It's that they did all of that when their 3rd best player, Kawhi Leonard, was about to turn 8 when this run started.
The Spurs have defined a generation of basketball. You can count on two hands the players that were active when the Spurs first won a title in 1999 that still play today. The Spurs also defined a generation by molding to many different ones. They won NBA Titles in defense-first eras, in the start of the 'Seven Seconds or Less' era, and now are competing for them in the Super Team era. They've won titles scoring under 100 points a game but limiting the opponents to scoring under 90, and now are reaching the finals with the best, most exact offense in the NBA. And they've done it all with a bunch of low picks, cast-offs, and random players, all gelling to create a beautiful system with even more beautiful results. I doubt that we will ever see something like this ever again, especially in basketball where transendant talent generally trumps systems, so we should treasure it all the more now.
In truth, the current version of the Spurs are four years old. The true Spurs Dynasty, built off a commitment to brilliant team defense, timely shooting, and Tim Duncan being awesome, peaked from the 02-03 season through the 06-07 season, where they won three titles and came alarmingly close to possibly winning five in a row (Fisher's miracle 0.4 second shot keeping them from a 3-2 lead in the '04 Conference Semifinals, and Ginobili's idiotic foul on Dirk keeping them from beating the '06 Mavs). They hung on for three more years with aging players, role players that were old as well, and while showing flashes of brilliance, like their Game 7 win on the road in New Orleans in 2008, or their first round win over the 2nd seed Mavs in 2010, they were pretty much done. It all ended when they were swept by a team whose offense resembles a lot of what the Spurs do now, as Steve Nash's Suns finally got one back in 2010.
Those three years where the Spurs were hanging on for life with their slower, more technically exacting style, they still managed to win 56, 54 and 50 games. Of course, when you consider they won 58, 58, 60, 57, 59, 63 and 58 games in the seven years prior, this was a sign of the times ending. And it would have been a naturally timed end. Duncan was 35, Ginobili was 33, Parker reached 30. Time was not on their side. The rest of the league wasn't yet clustered the way it is now, and the Celtics and Lakers dominated those three years. LeBron joined the Heat the next season (2010-11). Durant and Westbrook hit their stride the next season. Blake Griffin started playing the next season, as did Chris Paul joining him in Los Angeles. Derrick Rose won an MVP with Tom Thibadeau's defense running the Bulls the next year. The NBA landscape was about to get harder. So, of course, the Spurs won 61, 50 (in just 66 games), 58 and 62 games in the proceeding four years. How? That's the real mystery behind the Spurs mysticism, being able to start their run all over again.
Second, their defensive proficiency is ridiculous. That defensive consistency in their true dynasty is staggering. The defensive dip doesn't match up totally with the offensive dip which makes sense as even when they were losing their post-title effectiveness in that three year stretch they remained good defensively.
The most important takeaway when trying to understand how the Spurs reinvented themselves and extended their reign of awesomeness is that last column, their pace. Pace is essentially just a measure of how many possessions a team will play on average over a 48-minute game. The Spurs were consistently slow, if not plodding, back when they were defensively dominant and winning titles. In a weird coicidence, the three year malaise from 08-10 matches up with two of their slowest years. This is the only area where there is an obvious shift from the title-winning Spurs, the three year malaise Spurs and the reinvention. Right when they started being tops of the league again is when they started to play faster. From 1999 to 2010, they never ranked higher than 19th in pace. In 2010-11, they went to 14th, and were Top-10 each of the last three years. There's the conversion.
Pace is not a new technique. Teams today are still slower than in the 1980's, but isolation basketball killed pace off in the 90's and early-2000's. The Spurs capitalized on it, but they built off what their most infamous rival started. This all goes back to those Suns, the team the Spurs beat in 2005, 2007 and 2008. The Suns unleashed pace on the NBA in 2004-05, with Mike D'Antoni correctly realizing that the best times to score in a 24-second shot clock is early or very late. They chose early, and they made it work. The Spurs agreed, and while they aren't as fast as those Suns teams, they're downright sprinting compared to what they were. It hurt their defense initially as the players weren't used to having to expend that much quick energy on offense, hence their two lowest defensive efficiency years in 10-11 and 11-12, but they've seemed to correct that problem the last two years.
For the Spurs, the way they effortlessly changed from a slow team to a fast one is ridiculous. Overnight, they replaced old, defensive players with young shooters. Quite a few of the early members of the conversion are gone, like George Hill, Gary Neal and (essentially given his low minutes) Matt Bonner. They started the experiment. Kawhi Leonard, Patty Mills, Marco Belinelli and Boris Diaw are perfecting it.
The Spurs aren't the only high profile sports club to do something like this. There are too many parallels between the Spurs and the Patriots to write them all down, but one of the most interesting one is how they've reacted to when their title winning stopped. For the Patriots, this happened earlier, as their conversion you can point to won game. Oddly enough, just like it was losing to the Suns that killed the old Spurs, losing to the Colts in 2006 AFC Championship Game ended the dynastic Patriots, and they reinvented themselves as an offense-first team built on capitalizing on what the NFL didn't value at the time, underneath routes, YAC and Tight Ends. Like the Spurs, it has worked incredibly well, but while the Patriots have changed their personnel apart from Brady, the Spurs took it a step further, they changed the system, changed their mindset, but were able to keep their core personnel and still make it all work.
Gregg Popovich is still a defensive coach at heart. Just like Pat Riley won a lot with run-and-gun teams in the Lakers but showed his true colors in New York, Popovich showed his true colors from 1998-99 through 2008-09. Those 11 years the Spurs were so absurdly good at defense year in and year out, no matter who was alongside Duncan, Parker and Ginobili. And you can see Popovich's defensive inclination appearing the last two seasons. Their offense was for two years the best in the NBA. In 2010-11 and 2011-12, they had the best offense in the NBA, better than what they have now. They moved the ball just as beautifully as now, shot as many threes, and it was a joy to watch. But the defense suffered. The defense killed them in their shock 6-game loss to the Thunder in 2012.
Popovich and the Spurs sacrificed some of that offensive brilliance to recommit to defense and the results are there in full, as their offensive efficiency has dropped but the defense has returned to Top-5 levels. The Spurs results make it easy to see where it all came from and how it happened. They pushed the pace and took the league by storm offensively, and now settled and are starting to take it by storm defensively too.
The Spurs have been so good at their faster-pace, more offensively proficient, aesthetically beautifully style for enough years that it is hard to remember when they were sloggers, when they were playing 85-78 Games against the Pistons, or when people called them boring. Of course, I'm grateful for this as it has been easier for the Spurs brilliance to be nationally revered when they became more fun to watch, but it also obscures that a conversion happened. It comes down to mainly pace, but it happened. It was a concerted effort by a team wanting to stay one-step ahead of the league without having to overhault its roster (something a lot more complicated in the NBA than any other sport) and it did just that.
There's a lot more to come about the Spurs, and the Finals in general, in the next three days. This was just a start.
