The Onion: Tim Duncan: An NBA Legend Rides Into The Sunset At A Safe And Prudent Speed
* Plus, unlike K. Bryant, Duncan’s was’t a financial and sportive burden on his team’s shoulders for the last years of his career, and an altruistic player who improved team play (as opposed to disrupting it “at whim”).
* People with two-digit IQs prefer Kobe; those with three-digit IQs prefer Duncan.
* Perhaps now he will venture out of the closet. That’s according to his ex-wife.
* Duncan also had a classic white big man playing style – solid fundamentals, classic post moves, used the backboard a lot, etc. – which you rarely see anymore, even among white players. The European big men tend to be wing players who prefer the outside shot. The classic style is tried and true and can still be devastatingly effective, as Duncan showed, but it’s become unfashionable. Players would rather hoist long range bombs all day if they aren’t or can’t go for a dunk.
* I was really impressed with Duncan and the Spurs when they beat the Heat in the 2014 finals. Duncan could have retired after that tough loss to the Heat in the 2013 Finals, but Duncan and the Spurs came back with a vengeance and effectively ended Miami’s little Dream Team in the summer of 2014.
* One thing I’ve noticed about NBA players: they started behaving more like beta males around the time they started all coming into the league with tattoos in the mid to late 1990s. You have the Barkley, Shaq, and Kenny trio on TNT, and and then you watch the later generation on TV, and the latter all seem off to me. Kobe especially, when he’s interviewed every word and gesture just screams insecurity to me. And then you had Allen Iverson, the kind of kid whose clothes screamed aggression but in reality it’s all a cover for social awkwardness.
Compare how MJ interacted with the media to LeBron.
In contrast, Barkley & co. will never fake laugh at each other’s jokes, if someone says something stupid they’ll call it stupid. And then they’ll occasionally get mad at each other, but it never lasts more than a second.
I watch the tattooed generation interact with one another, and it’s a completely different dynamic. They fake laugh at each other’s jokes and seem overly sensitive to one another’s egos.
* Duncan was a great player and a great public face of the NBA: quiet, gentlemanly, no scandals. Unfortunately, he came in during the “street ball”/steroid era of the NBA, and then Kobe really stole his thunder with his prima donna antics and the team up with Shaq and Phil. So his greatness wasn’t really the first thing you noticed about the NBA; he probably could have lured a lot more whites back to the game, if he’d been the league’s #1 face.
It was also too bad for the NBA that Duncan didn’t play in a bigger media city, but he preferred small-town San Antonio anyway, given his quiet persona. I hope his outward persona reflected his inner personality as well, and we aren’t given a swerve in ten years like with OJ or Bill Cosby.
That said, Duncan is an excellent example of how basketball really is an individual sport. The Celtics under Rick Pitino were banking on landing Duncan with the #1 pick, but the draft lottery kicked to San Antonio, and the Celtics didn’t get the franchise player he was. Duncan’s humble, team-first persona would have been a great fit in Boston.
Once they lost out on Duncan, Pitino’s tenure was a disaster, and it took the Celtics a decade or more to be decent again. With Duncan, Pitino would have probably won the division or conference or the title and would have had a long career as big-name NBA coach.
Basketball truly is an individual sport.
Also, the NBA draft lottery is actually an admission by the NBA that they can’t stop teams or players from throwing games. So they just threw up their hands and just made it less of a lock that if you threw a season you got the #1. But the draft lottery plus Jordan’s double-secret suspension plus the fact that many players live paycheck to paycheck seem to point that the NBA probably has a lot more shady games than the news media is reporting.
* The Zapruder film for this conspiracy is the 2006 NBA Finals. The Dallas Mavericks won the first two games behind Dirk Nowitzki at the height of his powers. Then the Heat, who appeared to be simply overmatched, ended up winning the last 4, primarily because any Dallas player who looked askance at Dwyane Wade was called for a foul during those 4 games.
The common thread here is that David Stern, the NBA commish at the time, hated Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. I wouldn’t blame anyone for wondering if that was connected to the officiating.
And I am not a Dallas fan, just a basketball fan with two working eyes.
* Not only did the Mavs get called for everything, but the Heat players were getting away with blatant stuff, particularly on the perimeter (like stepping underneath the feet of Mavs shooters).
* You bet. You nailed the year – 2006. In the Eastern Conference finals, the Detroit Pistons had the league’s best record and were shooting for their second title in three years (they beat the Lakers in 5 in 2004 and lost to the Spurs in 7 in 2005.)
Every time Dwyane Wade drove to the hole, and I mean every time, the whistle blew and Wade got free throws. The Pistons were a great team, they moved the ball on offense, they played great team defense and they should have won. But no, the refs gave the series to the Heat with Wade and Shaq. Screw that. Most rigged NBA series ever. And it carried over into the finals against the Mavs.
The Pistons had set an NBA record by holding five straight opponents under 70 points in a game. Five straight. Nobody could score on the Pistons until that Eastern Conference finals and the David Stern mandate that the Pistons could not be allowed back to the Finals for the third straight year.
The hell with David Stern.
* You “think” the Pistons were jobbed in game 6 of the 1988 finals on the phantom call against Laimbeer? OF COURSE THEY WERE JOBBED! It was a terrible call, especially at that moment!
Riley had guaranteed a Laker repeat after ’87 and the whole world wanted to see “Showtime” do it again. Problem for the NBA was that the Pistons were actually the better team in that series.
(Of course, the Pistons won it in ’89 and ’90. They might have won again in ’91, but by then the NBA was determined to get Chicago and Michael Jordan to the finals. Maybe the Bulls really were better by ’91, but the NBA sure did not want a Piston three-peat.)
If you watch the ’88 game 6 again anytime soon, notice the funny business with the reversal on the play when the Lakers miss a shot, Magic grabs the offensive rebound, and then Dennis Rodman steals the pass and is headed for an uncontested dunk to give the Pistons a three point lead with 30 seconds left, only to have the play whistled dead (because the refs want to see if there was an errant shot-clock reset just before Magic’s rebound. The result? Lakers ball out of bounds, followed by a foul call on the Pistons.)
The only way for the Lakers to win in ’88 was to get every possible break from the refs.
And they did.
That Lakers team did have a following though. I was at the first finals game at the Pontiac Silverdome, and the Lakers had Jack Nicholson, Rob Lowe and the Beach Boys all in attendance. I don’t know if Dyan Cannon was there, but there were a lot of beach blondes who looked like her there.
The game was in Metro Detroit.
That’s a following.
* The one game suspension of Green game 5 hurt Warriors a lot and was bullshit. LeBron was the initiator and aggressor; he should have got the only technical. Golden State choked more than Cleveland won the series.Curry and Thompson missed open threes galore. Maybe the laws of basketball haven’t changed after all ?!
The last few minutes of game 7 were brutal. Everyone was feeling the pressure bigtime. Don’t remember seeing that before much.I thought Kyrie was MVP not LeBron . LeBron is incredible athlete but showed again he is better when he is not “the guy”. More Scottie than Michael.
Kerr got outcoached in game 7 as has been mentioned in press. Ezeli and Varejou were brutal on d and were left open on o and didn’t do shit. Varejou got big playing time at end. Why? Thought Kerr might turn into Phil but now not so sure.
* Possibly rigged. 3 games that I watched and blew my mind how bad the officiating was: 2000 Blazers vs. Lakers, game 7, 2002 Kings vs. Lakers, game 6 (this one is the gold standard), and as was pointed out, 2006 Heat vs. Mavs, game 5. Thinking back, and I am biased on this as a Pistons fan, I think the Pistons were jobbed in game 6 of the 88 finals against the Lakers on a phantom call against Laimbeer, sending Jabbar to the line to win the game.
* Tim Duncan was incredibly self-aware. He was probably the only NBA player of his generation to reflect intensely on the best way to approach the game from a psychological viewpoint.
Heck, he even co-authored a chapter on egos and egotistical behavior.
It was no surprise that he was able to build such a winning culture with his coach. He literally wrote the book on it. It may even be helpful for new NBA rookies to read his thesis… if they could even read at a college level.