![]() ![]() But as the Spurs showed last week, the Warriors are also skinny and unproven off their bench, and vulnerable to a team with athletic size. The Warriors are wildly talented, to be sure. There is more than a little continuity left from the team that won a franchise-record 67 regular season games last season.Īnd the team that beat San Antonio in the playoffs, the Oklahoma City Thunder, is now without Kevin Durant. Manu Ginobili and Patty Mills are back to anchor the bench. Pau Gasol, fresh off another star turn with Spain at the Olympics (he led his native land to a bronze medal), replaces Duncan in the middle, but Tony Parker is still running the show. Leonard is one of four starters back from last season (though guard Danny Green is out another couple of weeks with a quad injury). Just keep having a winning culture, and just keep moving from there.” I just want to do the same, or get close. ![]() “Tim was a great basketball player, led this team to five championships. ![]() “Just keep that culture going,” Leonard said after scoring a career-high 35 to lead the way in a 29-point Spurs pasting of the Warriors in Oakland on opening night. Entire quarters were throttled as Leonard shut down this guy, then that option, then another, and another More crucially, he was already ensconced as the league’s top individual defender, shattering his opponents’ shooting percentages and game plans. They’d gradually increased his workload, making him the focal point in the halfcourt, and he’d responded with a career-high 21.2 points per game. Kawhi Leonard had already established himself as the Spurs’ best offensive player over the last year or so. I got better at it in my last three years in Portland … but it’s not about having a pecking order it’s about getting guys to be better at it.”įortunately for the Spurs, they may have the best two-way player in the league to build around. It’s about showing it and doing it in those teaching moments. That’s how Tim started it and did it for 20 years, so that’s how our culture is. “Coach tells us to be on the nail, close out, do it this way, you do it. “It’s more about doing the right thing, and showing the guys the way to do it,” Spurs forward LaMarcus Aldridge said. He leaves that, now, to the next generation. A joke or a bang on the head from Duncan did wonders for the young and struggling his words were brief but powerful. He had a major hand in each of the Spurs’ championship seasons, and was Obi Wan to a generation of knights who had yet to learn the ways of the Spurs. But I miss him, sure.”ĭuncan is the franchise’s all-time leader in games (1,392), minutes (47,368), points (26,496), rebounds (15,091), blocks (3,020) and field goals (10,285) - as well as rings (five). I’m getting used to a new look, I guess, when I look around the gym. “It’s felt weird every day,” Popovich said last week, “just walking in the gym and not seeing the big fella. He has an open invitation to do whatever he wants for the franchise. The Spurs don’t have their paintball-loving, franchise all-time-best and future-Hall-of-Famer as their defensive anchor for the first time in two decades, and that will take a while to fully process during the course of this season.ĭuncan still shows up from time to time at practice, detailing what coach Gregg Popovich wants done on the floor. Give the Golden State Warriors all the light and the heat and the immediate expectations. So, Tim Duncan retires in June? I see you a Kobe retirement and raise you a KG retirement. Even when they successfully recruited LaMarcus Aldridge as a free agent in 2015, the biggest story of that NBA summer was the insane on again-off again DeAndre Jordan follies with the Dallas Mavericks and LA Clippers, not San Antonio’s low-key persuasion. There’s never any attention paid to the Spurs in the offseason. ![]() It’s not that there was no attention paid to the San Antonio Spurs in the offseason. ![]()
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