Spurs win game 1. Tim Duncan shot 9 of 10, and had 21 points and 10 rebounds to lead his team in scoring. At age 38. He became the oldest player to do that since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did it at age 40. And he’s now only one game behind Magic Johnson on the all-time playoff double-doubles list. Not bad for an old man. Next game is on Sunday, and I’ll be in the building for it. I expect to have no voice for days following.
Category: Basketball
Andres Alvarez was kind enough to invite me to be the voice of Spurs fandom on the BoxScoreGeeks Show. We discussed the narratives of this postseason run, and take a historical look at the Spurs’ accomplishments over the last seventeen years. There are also podcast versions of the show you can subscribe to if you like. Here’s the link.
And this artsy Vine of Manu’s clutch 3 that ABC made to advertise them is fucking gorgeous.
For my part, I’ll be flying back to San Antonio to attend Game 2.
Tim Duncan says they’re going to get it done this time. I believe him.
This video captures many of the things I adore about the San Antonio Spurs. [EDIT: The original video was taken down. I’ve switched it out with a mirror.]
What you wouldn’t learn from watching this wonderful video, though, is that for the first half of their era of dominance, the Spurs were thought of as offensively mediocre, but a defensive powerhouse. The reversal of perception over the last decade, despite having the same player core, is stunning. And it’s a credit to Gregg Popovich, who, as Nate Silver notes, has been “uniquely able to stave off regression to the mean.” Ian Levy picked up on that and observed that as his teams’ defensive effictiveness waned, it was nearly perfectly compensated for by increasing offensive prowess. (The trend lines in season ORTG+ and DRTG+ by season are perfectly parallel.) So it’s not just, as the video suggests, that the Spurs play perfectly executed team basketball. That’s what they do now, yes. But in the broader sense, what the Spurs under Gregg Popovich do, year after year, is play perfectly to their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.
For most of the summer, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to watch basketball this year. Game 6 of the finals against Miami was the most heartbreaking experience I’ve ever had as a sports fan. Worse than Manu’s foul on Dirk Nowitski in 2006, worse than Derek Fisher’s 0.4 seconds shot in 2004. To come within 30 seconds of the championship and then have everything go wrong had me depressed for weeks. I had actual bad dreams about the final possessions of regulation. As late as September I would be going about my life when suddenly the thought Tim Duncan had to go from that finals experience straight to divorce court would blip through my brain and suddenly no human activity would seem worthwhile against such profound and arbitrary unfairness. I spent months asking myself questions like: is following the NBA a self destructive behavior for me? Is it fundamentally unhealthy to allow oneself to be so emotionally invested in something over which one has no control and which is, by design, subject randomness and erratic outcomes? And for most of the summer I suspected that the answer was probably yes.
But you don’t always get to choose what you love. While I had been intentionally avoiding sports media during the offseason, once training camp started details began to trickle into my awareness. I started to be curious how Aron Baynes was doing on defense now that he’d had time to learn the system. Would Marco Belinelli be a Boris Diaw-like player who, in the Spurs system, sees an immediate jump in productivity, or a Richard Jefferson style failed reclamation project? Will Cory Joseph, Patty Mills, or Nando De Colo finally secure the backup point guard spot? Just how good is Kawhi Leonard looking, and how high is his ceiling? Over the course of the preseason my apocalyptic mood gave way, with little fanfare, to a long-familiar eagerness to see what my team would be able to do this year. And while loving something over which you can exert precisely zero influence probably is setting yourself up for a predictable fall, at least with a sports team you know (barring unusual exceptions) it will always be there for you again next year. And hey, the Spurs look pretty good this year. He sucked in the Finals, but Manu’s preseason numbers were fantastic. Belinelli and Ayers are shaping up. And Kawhi Leonard is killing it in the new HEB commercials, with wisdom that is true of MooTopia enriched milk and basketball seasons where a team comes within one possession of winning their fifth championship: details aside, “It is good.”
Game 1 against the Grizzlies tips off on Wednesday. Go Spurs Go!
The San Antonio Spurs, perennially underrepresented in sports media, have been so phenomenally good this year that people are actually starting to write articles about them. There have been several nice ones recently.
- “Gregg Popovich’s Portable Program” by J. A. Adande. An analysis of how the Spurs’ culture has led to success, and why it is now the model that other teams–especially small-market teams–are attempting to emulate.
- “21 Shades of Gray” by Chris Ballard. A long and detailed character study of Tim Duncan, which ran as a cover story for Sports Illustrated.
- “The San Antonio Spurs Aren’t Boring” by Kevin Arnovitz. A detailed analysis of the Spurs “motion weak” offense, and why it is both so effective and so overlooked by NBA fans.
- John Hollinger, who I generally dislike for crimes against meaningful statistics, had a pretty great Per-Diem column on the Spurs’ season. You have to pay ESPN to read it, unless you manage to find it mirrored somewhere or something.
- “Kawhi Leonard not awed by finishing fourth in Rookie of the Year voting.” More specifically, he said, “I wasn’t really looking at the rankings. It’s an individual honor. Congratulations to whoever won it.” That is either the driest humor out of a rookie since, well, Tim Duncan, or Leonard is in fact a machine built to be a San Antonio Spur. Noteworthy also is that, of the top 12 vote-getters for ROY, Leonard is the only one still playing. Congrats to whoever won that individual award, indeed.
Some rare good sports reporting from the usual suspects. For statistically defensible analysis, though, the gold standard remains The Wages of Wins, with important statistical backup from NerdNumbers, The NBA Geek, and Baskteball-Reference.com
He passed it through the entire Lakers team. All five of them, frozen like statues.
- On Robert Krulwich’s NPR blog, a post about the shape of stories as drawn by Kurt Vonnegut. Includes one of my favorite science cartoons ever.
- The Genderfloomp Reading List. I won a copy of Whipping Girl as my prize for being Best Dressed. I’ve only read the introduction so far, but it looks very good.
- Qik.com. This is ostensibly as service for real-time uploading of video from a cellphone to the internet. I need to look into it more. The potential implications for citizen journalism, esp. in repressive legal cultures, are huge.
- Obituary for Felix Zandman.
- “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas reveals that he is in the United States illegally, and what this has meant for his life and career. An excellent example of why the Dream Act would benefit the nation.
- “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.” Matt Taibbi’s profile of this election’s craziest serious candidate.
- A public art installation consisting of a topographically interesting basketball court. I would like to see this turned into an all-star game event.
- “A Person Paper on Purity in Language.” Douglas Hofstadter skewering people who argue that there is nothing sexist about the English language.
- Finally, a video I liked:
PAC-MAN HIGHWAY – Level 1 (gameplay) from NotWorkingFilms on Vimeo.