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There have now been 42 players who have taken part in NBA championships in Spurs uniforms over the past nine years. That's an incredible number, an average of 10.5 different players per championship team, and my-oh-my is it a diverse group.
Talk about role players -- this franchise has had everything from a (Jackie) Butler to a (Gerard) King. The Spurs have had two players who won titles then went on to become NBA general managers, Steve Kerr and Danny Ferry. They've had a future head coach, Avery Johnson, and a future assistant, Mario Elie. They've had two Slovenians, two Argentines, an Australian, a Kiwi, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Mongolian and Stephen Jackson, whichever planet he's from.
The Spurs are like the old weather joke: If you don't like their roster, just wait a few minutes and it'll change.
But there has been one constant: Tim Duncan. Back in 1999, he was a 23-year-old second-year player when he won The Finals MVP award (the second-youngest in NBA history to do so) and led the Spurs to the first championship in franchise history. So wide-eyed was Duncan back then that he spent most of his first five-game Finals experience with a camcorder in hand, taping the proceedings. "I am just making a record for myself," Duncan said at the time. "There's no guarantee I'll ever get back."
Ha!
Duncan has, of course, gotten back and last week ran his record to 4-0 in Finals play by anchoring a sweep of the Cavaliers. It was, according to Duncan, a subpar series for him individually, as he averaged just 18.3 points. For the first time in his Finals career, Duncan was not the series MVP -- that distinction went to skittering point guard Tony Parker -- but still, there is a sense that with this championship, Duncan has inexorably elevated himself into the game's all-time elite. He has four titles now, and each has come with a different arrangement of that 42-man cast of characters. Because of that, we must bump aside our passion for the nifty perimeter player du jour (apologies to LeBron and Dwyane) and acknowledge that Duncan is the best player in the game today and the best player of his era.
"Tim is the common denominator," says Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. "It doesn't matter what year he's been in or what championship year. He's got a different cast around him from '99, '03 and '05. He's welcomed them all, he's found a way to help them all fit, feel comfortable in their roles, and not many players can do that. But he is that easy to play with, and his skills are so fundamentally sound that other people can fit in more easily. And I think that's the key to the whole thing, the way they fit around him."
True, Duncan is not one who excites the masses. He is a paradox. On one hand, fans complain that modern NBA players carry a little too much 'tude and too many tattoos, and in the quadrennial anxiety attack that is USA Basketball in the Olympics, we whine that American hoopsters just can't handle the fundamentals anymore. But here we have Duncan, a guy Bill Russell labeled "the most fundamentally sound player I've ever seen." And yes, Duncan does sport tattoos.
But the most prominent is the rendering of Merlin the Magician on his chest, which he got because of his fondness for fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. It's not exactly Bloods and Crips-type stuff.
Duncan seems to bore the nation's sports fans. His jersey ranks 15th on the NBA's sales list, behind that of such luminaries as Ben Wallace and Stephon Marbury. The nickname given to him by TNT wiseguy Charles Barkley is Groundhog Day, which evokes the kind of monotony that doesn't attract big audiences. This Finals was the least-watched (6.2 rating) in history, lower than the 6.5 posted in 2003 (another Spurs Finals). "We're not flashy; we don't have guys who do a lot of flashy things, except Manu (Ginobili)," says forward Robert Horry. "Maybe people want to see more flashiness. But you don't have to be flashy as long as you get the job done."
Duncan keeps getting the job done, which leaves the NBA in an awkward position. It has a superstar big man who has taken his place among the all-time greats -- Duncan now ranks behind only Wilt Chamberlain, Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the list of big men in history, just slightly ahead of Shaquille O'Neal. It has a team that has established a dynasty -- albeit an odd one, with no back-to-back titles and no consistent rival (the Spurs have beaten four different teams in both The Finals and the Western Conference finals). And, yet, no one seems to care.
Even worse for San Antonio, the league has enacted rules designed to open up offense and boost scoring. But the Spurs, the most defense-minded team in the league, just keep winning by uglying up the games. They averaged only 86.5 points against Cleveland but held the Cavs to 80.5 on 39.5 percent shooting.
After a particularly woeful 75-72 win in Game 3, Popovich noted that the teams set offensive basketball back 10 years. "We were the caterpillar before it becomes the butterfly," guard Brent Barry says. "This was one of those brown, furry caterpillars that you think is poisonous and then your kid picks it up and tries to eat it." Come on, America, how could you not want to watch that?
Despite the league's best efforts to fuel offense by tinkering with the rules, and despite the spread of uptempo hoops in places like Phoenix, Toronto, Washington and Memphis, it's Duncan and the Spurs who keep winning. Thus, franchises like Cleveland (with Ferry and coach Mike Brown, who was an assistant in San Antonio for three years) have clearly tried to emulate the Spurs' style -- and have found success. Presumably, the same thing will happen in Seattle, where Sam Presti was plucked from the Spurs' front office to run the Sonics and where Spurs assistant P.J. Carlesimo is a candidate to coach.
And the Spurs aren't going anywhere. They're an aging bunch, but the core still has five good years left. Parker is only 25. Ginobili will turn 30 this summer. Duncan is 31 and shows no signs of slowing down -- he averaged 20 points on 54.6 percent shooting to go with 10.6 rebounds this season and has mastered the art of pacing himself for the postseason. The rest of the team has done likewise.
"We made plays, we found ways to get it done," Duncan says. "I didn't play the greatest, people missed shots, they got offensive rebounds, they made plays. But we found a way to win. That's what this team is all about. No matter what happens, we find ways to win."
Give him any opponent, any cast of teammates, any setting and it seems that Duncan will, indeed, find a way to push his team to victory. It has happened four times now. If only we spent a little more time noticing.

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