Spurs of the Moment

I would say that the Miami Heat Dwyane Wade and Friends were just beat with the Ugly Stick, perhaps the entire Ugly Tree. And they can expect another drubbing on March 14th.

Highlights Below:

Don’t look now but the Spurs just won four games in a row – the last three against the alleged contenders of the Western Conference. Granted the Mavs were without Dirk, it’s still satisfying to watch S.A. smash thru the early conference favorites one after the other.

After beating the Lakers 97-82 last Tuesday, the Spurs went on to beat the Mavs in Dallas on Thursday 99-93. That was an interesting game since the Mavericks were without Dirk Nowitzki but the Mavericks still gave the Spurs all they could handle behind Caron Butler’s season-high 30 points and yet another triple-double from Jason Kidd. Unfortunately for the Mavericks, Tim Duncan had a bounce back game with 17 points and 11 rebounds, and Gary Neal came off the bench to bombard Dallas with 21 points of his own. I kind of had to laugh at the Mavs starting Brian Cardinal. Did they think he could pass for Nowitzki and draw double-teams or something? Anyway, the poor Mavs – who I actually am more worried about than the Lakers right now – suffered another setback when Caron Butler hurt is knee in their next game, a loss in Milwaukee. finally, the Spurs completely dismantled the Thunder 101-74 on Saturday night. They held Kevin Durant to 16 points and the Thunder to 33% shooting from the field. Only Serge Ibaka came to play with 14 points, 13 boards, four blocks, and a steal – although he shot only 5-of-13 from the floor himself. Tim Duncan led all scorers with 21 points while Tony Parker had 14 points and 10 dimes.

So there the Spurs sit atop the West – the league in fact – with a 29-4 record. Nearly halfway thru the season I have to say that I think they’re only contending with three teams this year: The Mavericks (25-8), the Celtics (25-7), and maybe Miami’s Dwyane Wade and Friends (26-9). Orlando has an outside shot with their revamped roster, and Lakers can’t be counted out just yet, but if I had to call it now then I’d say get ready for a Spurs-Celtics finals. I just don’t see anyone in the West with the depth or the championship pedigree of the Spurs. Dallas is deep but are not proven winners. The Lakers are winners, but their depth is non-existent – and WTF happened to Ron Artest? Can someone chuck a beer at this clown and get his blood pumping again? As for the East, the Celtics are the clear front-runner so long as they can remain healthy during the playoffs. It seems that they are getting their injuries out of the way early this season (Rondo, Pierce, Garnett, Shaq) so maybe that won’t be an issue. Miami is kind of a question mark. They are figuring out how to win, but can they do it in a 7-game series against a quality team? I say no. And they have to remain healthy too. Losing Haslem hurt them a lot and their interior defense was weak to begin with. Can LeBron and Wade win them four games in a series on their own? Probably not.

Next up to bat are the New York Knicks, who are actually one of my favorite teams. Yes, I grew up loving the Knicks – partially cuz I was a kid who was happy to sport some Ewing sneakers, I hated Michael Jordan and all of his zombie-like worshippers, and gravitated to the scrappiness of players like Xavier McDaniel, Charles Oakley, and John Starks. Chris Childs punching Kobe also helped. Having said all that, the Knicks stand no chance. The Spurs are just better in every way, and the Knicks will be without Danilo Gallinari who is expected to miss the next 2-3 weeks with a sprained knee. So with that, I expect the Spurs to notch their 5th win in row tomorrow night.

The Spurs slapped around the Miami Dwyane Wades a few days ago. It’s a pre-season game and James and Bosh both sat out most of it, but it still feels good for the Spurs to be the first to beat them.  DeJuan Blair continued to have a solid pre-season with 13 points and seven boards.

In other news, Popovich is beginning to look at a new approach to his backup small forward situation. It’s become obvious that the “Next Bruce Bowen” approach will net little more than another Keith Bogans disaster, so he is now looking more at the offensive firepower side of things.

To find exactly what he’s looking for, Popovich would need to build a time machine.

“If I had my druthers, and it was a perfect world, I want Bruce Bowen to be 28 years old and back on our team,” Popovich said, echoing a persistent preseason theme.

Seeing as the world is imperfect, Popovich doesn’t always have his druthers and Bowen is 39 years old and wears bow ties on ESPN for a living, the search continues.

What Popovich wants most in a backup to Richard Jefferson is a defensive menace who could be, in the coach’s words, “a pain in the ass.” He isn’t certain anybody on Sunday’s charter flight to Mexico City for Tuesday’s game against the Clippers fits that description.

At this point, Popovich will settle for something less.

“If I can get somebody who can at least spell defense and say the word once in a while, then I’ll know they have some interest in it,” he said.

…

Absent the next Bowen, however, Popovich will accept the next Peja Stojakovic.

“The worse they are defensively, the better they’d better be able to shoot,” Popovich said. “Or there’s no reason to have them around.”

Uh oh. That sounds to me like more people will be getting cut than I originally thought.

Here are the ten players we know will be back:
1. Tim Duncan
2. Tony Parker
3. Manu Ginobili
4. George Hill
5. Tiago Splitter
6. DeJuan Blair
7. Richard Jefferson
8. Antonio McDyess
9. James Anderson
10. Matt Bonner

Beyond them, it’s hard to say who we should bother getting too attached to. There are eight other players vying for a spot:
Kirk Penney
Gary Neal
Bobby Simmons
Alonzo Gee
Garrett Temple
Marcus Cousin
Curtis Jerrells
James Gist

If the Spurs keep a maximum of 15 then the three who I think will get cut are Cousin, Gist and Jerrells.
If they cut down to 13, then say goodbye to two of these guys: Temple, Simmons or Gee.

Well, now that at least some of the dust has settled, I figure I may as well weigh in on the LeBron James fiasco/shenanigans/debacle/whatever-the-hell-you-wanna-call-it. We all know the basics: LeBron had the opportunity to sign for more money with Cleveland, his hometown, and the only team he has ever played for, but decided to join forces with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami to form a super team henceforth know on this blog as Miami’s Dwyane Wade and Friends. As he put it, he is taking his ego.. err talents to South Beach. Here’s my take on the madness leading up to LeBron’s scurrying away from Cleveland, and the ensuing chaos.

The Decision
This was where LeBron went horribly wrong. I don’t particularly agree with the decision itself because it seems to me that it would be beneath him as one of the potentially greatest players ever to go hitch his wagon to Dwyane Wade’s.  Wade already has a ring anyway, and no matter how many they win together, Wade will always have that one more. But I can ignore all that, or at least I could if that was all there was to ignore. I get that he wanted to play with his buddies and try and win some easy rings and all that, but this was like taking your girlfriend on Jerry Springer to tell her you were sleeping with her sister, mother, and aunt and expected her to chill out and just remember the good times, even be grateful that you were with her for as long as you were. Who wants to be embarrassed and dumped in public by an attention whore? I don’t blame the people of Cleveland for hating this guy’s guts now. I won’t get into the allegations that he mailed in some playoff games over the last couple of years – at least not yet – but I find it strange that he never made it back to the NBA Finals even though his team continued to get better and better. We all knew there was no way he could leave Cleveland if they won it all, so maybe winning it all hasn’t exactly been as high a priority the last couple of seasons as getting out of Ohio and teaming up with Wade and Bosh…. or his team just choked, he had a wack coach, and his elbow was bothering him. I suppose that either is plausible.

LeBron vs. Kobe vs. Jordan
It became apparent during the NBA Finals that Kobe “6-for-24″ Bryant was nowhere near Jordan’s level. Actually, it was apparent to most of us for some time, but that pretty much sealed the deal. We always had high hopes for LeBron though. He has a tremendous skill set that has been compared to Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. However, after his flame-out in this year’s playoffs, Bill Simmons went on to write a brilliant piece on LeBron that summed up what we all had tried to ignore for too long. LeBron is not the second coming of Jordan, he is better compared to Dr J when you really look at it. As Simmons wrote:

Doc’s Philly teams kept self-combusting at the worst possible times. The ’77 Sixers took a 2-0 lead in the Finals, then blew four straight. They lost do-or-die playoff games by two points (1978) and three points (1979). In 1980, everyone remembers Magic (only a rookie) playing five positions, notching a 42-15-7 and improbably winning Los Angeles the title; nobody ever wonders why Philly, playing at home against a team missing the 1980 MVP (Kareem), laid such an unforgivable egg. In 1981, the Sixers blew a 3-1 series lead to Boston in the Eastern Conference finals, losing the last three games by five points total. (And by the way, they led in the final minute of all three games.) By the time Philly blew the 1982 Finals, the consensus on Doc was this: phenomenal player, loved by all, an ambassador for the game, one of the best ever … doesn’t quite have it.

Then Moses showed up, Philly finally won a title, and people everywhere forgot they had felt that way.

Back to LeBron: I think we know what we have. He’s Doc 2.0 with a little Magic and a healthy dose of Bo sprinkled in.

In all honesty, this is the biggest realization we all got from this whole ordeal. LeBron is not who thought he was, what we thought he could be, or what we wanted him to be. He just isn’t. He won’t be the legend we thought he could be, the savior of Cleveland Sports that we hoped he would be, or the competitor he probably ought to be. Jordan won his first championship in his seventh season, in LeBron’s seventh season he got booted out of the playoffs even though he was on the winningest team of the past two seasons and had a better team than the one he made it to the Finals with a few years earlier. Then he said F it and bounced. When it comes to sports hate, Kobe Bryant as at the top of my list. I can’t stand the guy, but right now I like Kobe more than LeBron because at least Kobe is more of a competitor. It doesn’t matter if you want to be or not, if you are among the best in the league you are going to be in Jordan’s shadow. Kobe is trying like hell to get out from under that shadow, and I can at least respect that. LeBron seems comfortable there, as long as he is a “global icon”… whatever the #!$^ that is.

Sour Grapes
Of course, things continued to get creepier when Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cavaliers, lashed out at LeBron in an open letter that read like a bitter ex-girlfriend trying to do voodoo on her former lover. In the letter, Gilbert called LeBron the “self-declared former King” as if he had nothing to do with pushing the whole “King James”, “We are all witnesses” crap on us for the past few years. He even went on to say that LeBron tanked a few games. This is all the very definition of the phrase “Sour Grapes”. In Aesop’s fable, the Fox couldn’t reach the grapes so he convinced himself they were no good anyway, and that’s exactly what Gilbert is doing. He couldn’t keep “King” LeBron in Cleveland and so LeBron is now a cowardly, narcissistic, quitter. Of course, then for good measure he tries to throw the hex at LeBron like some kind of jilted witchdoctor by saying that LeBron will take the “curse” with him when he leaves Cleveland. Furthermore, if he was so convinced that LeBron was quitting on the team, why fire Mike Brown? The only reason that makes sense is that he was trying to appease a player he despised in order to keep him around, but it’s not like LeBron was helping find a new coach. But look, I get it. Dan Gilbert is the owner of the team and the fans who pay to see that team are pissed off and heartbroken that their guy just left. He has a responsibility to those fans to empathize with them, and a responsibility as a business owner to try to keep their business, so he is gonna say what he needs to in order to fire them up and get them to keep coming to games. I just believe he could have done it without coming off like such an idiot.

The KG Rule
There’s one real reason I partially don’t fault LeBron for leaving Cleveland, and that reason is Kevin Garnett. KG toiled away in mediocrity for years in Minnesota, only sniffing the Finals once. He was loyal to a fault and to the point that most basketball fans wanted him to get traded to a half-way decent team. We couldn’t bare to watch him wither away without a championship, or at least playing in the Finals once. Even Ewing, Barkley and Malone got to experience the NBA Finals, and KG was at least on their level. I feel like if a potentially great player has spent more than five years on a crappy team, then we should let him walk away without judgement and without branding him a cowardly, disloyal, selfish jerk. I will call this “The KG Rule”. When he was traded to Boston and won the whole thing in his first season as a Celtic, we were all happy for him and even had to wonder how many more he could have won and how much different his legacy could have been if he had played on a legit contender his whole career, or at least a few years sooner. Who can blame LeBron for not wanting to toil away in Cleveland to the point that people are begging him to request a trade? The only snag here is that LeBron’s ceiling is higher than KG’s, and he hasn’t been on mediocre teams his whole career. So while I want to apply The KG Rule to him, I can’t really do it in good conscience… the shoe just doesn’t quite fit.

Wade’s Team
Now LeBron is in Miami, teamed up with another alpha-dog who already has a championship to speak of. Who do you think is the leader here? The guy who has already been with the team for seven seasons and won a title or the new guy who is still chasing one? This is Wade’s team by all accounts, no matter how anyone sugar-coats it, and now LeBron can play second banana to Wade and not take all the criticism when they lose. The problem here is that he won’t even get half the love when they win. Bosh will get some credit as the only one of the three who plays in the paint, and Wade is undeniably the leader here, so LeBron is gonna have to get used to being Prince James.

Cleveland Now
So where does this leave Cleveland? They still have capable players in Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison. They have a potentially solid player JJ Hickson waiting in the wings for more playing time. They recently traded for point guard Ramon Sessions and dumped the problematic Delonte West in the process. Plus they received a gang of draft picks when LeBron decided to split. They have a decent future ahead of them. They are obviously not an elite team by any means, but not all is lost. They will still have to fight for a playoff spot, but I think they could still make it to the post-season. I certainly hope so, and who wouldn’t watch a Cleveland-Miami first round series and secretly(?) root for the Cavaliers?

Balance of Power
Plenty of fans, writers, and other random observers have already given Miami the trophy for the next few years. I am not one of them. The Lakers blew it against Detroit a few years back with Kobe, Shaq, Malone, and Payton after everyone handed it to them. Injuries can strike anyone at any time – just ask Dirk, Ginobili, Garnett, and a slew of others who missed crucial playoff games in the past. But more than those things, other teams are getting better as well. The Lakers signed Matt Barnes and Steve Blake, an upgrade at point guard over Jordan Farmar, and are still the reigning champs. And don’t think that Kobe isn’t working out as you are reading this so that he can erase that 6-for-24 performance as well as Miami’s title aspirations. The Mavericks have choked in the playoffs the last few years, but have also reloaded with Tyson Chandler and Dominique Jones, and it would be sweet for them to get back at Miami. The Spurs added Spanish League MVP Tiago Splitter along with draft pick James Anderson. And that’s just the West. What about Orlando who is still a threat, and Chicago who just added Boozer? Any of these teams could beat Miami next season and after, and personally, I hope they all do.

To sum things up, I don’t think LeBron was wrong to leave Cleveland. I think he was stupid to leave. Five championships in Miami won’t mean as much for his “brand” as one in Cleveland would. And there is no guarantee he will win any at this point. He jumped ship but it was the way he did it, by basically taking a crap on his former team and city on live TV, that made it so reprehensible. The sad thing is that despite his childish, selfish, easy-way-out attitude, he is likely to win a championship or two, maybe more if he’s lucky. But I won’t be rooting for him.

The Spurs signed their top draft pick, James Anderson, today. All that’s left is for us to see him actually play a game for the Spurs. Hopefully his hammy stops acting up because I need to see something so that I don’t think the Spurs wasted the pick.

Speaking of which, the home pre-season schedule was announced and the first game will be against the Miami Dwyane Wade and Friends on Saturday, Oct. 9. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. I really don’t know what else to call that team anymore. It’s clearly the Dwyane Wade show featuring LeBron James and Chris Bosh. Wade is the only true alpha-dog on that squad because it’s painfully obvious now that LeBron doesn’t have the requisite testicular fortitude and Bosh has always been a second banana playing first banana for a wack team.

There’s also a good read on Spurs.com about the impact of the Tiago Splitter signing. For all the scheming and salary dumping and shenanigans going on in the league, the Spurs are quietly putting together the pieces of a legit contender for 2011.

As if the Spurs being ousted by the Suns wasn’t bad enough. My Playoff Predictions went from perfect to utterly ruined in Round Two as the Cavs choked against the Celtics in what could be LeBron’s last championship run in Cleveland.

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Tony Parker does not want to go to New York. In fact, Parker is trying to make it perfectly clear that he wants to be a Spur and nothing else.

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The Spurs beat the Miami Heat last night 88-76. The game ended up being a lot close than it should have considering that the Spurs had a 24-point lead in the first half. The Spurs outscored Miami 29-14 in the first quarter, but the Heat tried to make a little run late in the game and even outscored the Spurs by six points in the second half. In the end, the early damage was too much, Ginobili was too much, and the Heat not being able to hit shots was too much.

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The Spurs have won seven of their last eight games and are on a three game winning streak again after that debacle against Cleveland. OK, so they only played the Clippers, T-Wolves, and Knicks, but as the Knicks showed our North Texas Nemesis, if you don’t come to play, there are no easy wins in this league – not even against the cellar dwellers.

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I suppose it’s not a foregone conclusion that a team will create a highlight reel every time they play the T-Wolves, but the Spurs sure made it look easy. I highly recommend the video below as evidence of this. The Spurs finally looked like a team comfortable with each other and were firing on all cylinders last night. The final score of 117-99 was three points more than I predicted, and the Wolves scored 10 more points than I expected, but I can’t be the least bit bothered by that after the way the Spurs handled business. It wasn’t just that they won, but that they were so fun to watch. If this chemistry is a glimpse of what’s in store for us down the stretch then watch out LA, Dallas and all other would-be contenders. Above all, one player stood out the most, and I guess by the title above you know who that was. Manu Ginobili was one rebound shy of a triple-double and turned down Popovich’s offer to stay in the game with a few minutes left to try and get it. Statistics, Triple-Doubles. A Jedi craves not these things.

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