Regular season success: Is that all we were made for?

Being a cynic, there's always something bitter-sweet about having to say "I told you so."  Because, while I do relish being right, I don't like being right about bad things.  While I may be completely off base in saying that the reason the Spurs are down 3-1 in the first round of the playoffs has anything to do with any analysis I may have put out previously, it still bothers me that we are down 3-1 to the Memphis Grizzlies without Rudy Gay.  It makes me sad.  Of course, I could just be continually underestimating the likes of Zach Randolph, Marc Gasol, Sam Young, Tony Allen, Shane Battier, and Mike Conley.  Adrian Wojnarowski has already declared this the death of a dynasty, and frankly, I don't know that I entirely disagree with him.  While he pays lip service to never writing the Spurs off because of the classiness of the organization, he already has.  As Graydon Gordion has surmised, Gregg Popovich was out-coached, which I also may or may not agree with.  Why am I so ambiguous?  Well simply put, it's because I haven't really watched the series too much, but Graydon brings up an excellent point: we should be winning at least 4 out of 5 of these matchups, but we're still losing the game.  Why?  I don't know beyond the fact that the Spurs are playing like crap, which I can't say for sure, but if they weren't, we wouldn't be down 3-1 against the Grizzlies after an embarrassing 18 point rout in Memphis last night.

Given we're in this position it's hard not to draw comparisons to the 67-15 Dallas Mavericks of 2007 and their first round defeat at the hands of the 8th seeded We Believe era Golden State Warriors headed by Baron Davis and the maniacal coaching of Don Nelson.  Already, writers are throwing out the possibility of only the second 8th seed upset (since the Warriors in 2007) since the first round series moved to seven games.  The only question that we as Spurs fans have to ask is, how did it all come to this?  Shouldn't we, the top seeded playoff powerhouse, be standing tall over the team that has been among the laughingstock franchises of the league since trading Pau Gasol for Kwame Brown, Javaris Crittenton, and the rights to Marc Gasol?  I could go on spouting how I thought Popovich should have played Tiago Splitter earlier in the series to mitigate any damage Marc Gasol would do to us, I could say any number of things, how we needed another defensive big man to be a shot blocking presence in the paint, but what's done is done, and frankly, the regular season had me convinced I was wrong anyways.

I've always touted a couple of things that the Spurs needed this season to be successful, a shot blocking presence and a defensive minded wing player, neither of which we really addressed (no I don't consider Richard Jefferson or James Anderson really an answer to the latter issue).  But then I thought, hey, what do I know about basketball?  From the box scores, my immediate reaction is that the offense is stalling.  While Duncan is rested, we can no longer expect him to take over a series, while both he and Antonio McDyess have shown that you can extend your career through smart playing and veteran savvy, it's not 2003 anymore. While Tony Allen claims Manu "faked" his elbow injury, I think if that were the case the series would be 3-1 in the Spurs favor.  From all appearances, we're not playing Spurs basketball which we need, but that's not why I'm here.

Let's look at our roster really quickly:

PG - Tony Parker, George Hill
SG - Manu Ginobili, Gary Neal
SF - Richard Jefferson, James Anderson, Danny Green
PF - Antonio McDyess, Matt Bonner, DeJuan Blair
C - Tim Duncan, Tiago Splitter

That is our roster.  Sure you might throw Chris Quinn in there, but I wouldn't consider him a major part of the rotation.  We played a wheeling and dealing offense that honestly stunned a lot of teams.  However, a lot of it predicated on so many things going right.  Now, people have argued with me that every team needs a lot of things to go right in order to win a championship, but my reservation with the Spurs was simply that we didn't have much wriggle or buffer room.  This is no longer 1999 where would expect Duncan and Robinson to combine for almost 60 points, 30 rebounds, 10 assists, 12 blocks per game in a low possession 90 point game.  This isn't 2003 where Tim Duncan could single handedly score at will and dominate a whole series on both the offensive end and the defensive end.  Sure Duncan can still put up numbers, but the onus of the offense now falls to the backcourt tandem of Parker and Ginobili.  Now, I still believe that there is no one in the league that can stop Ginobili other than himself, but as we've seen time and time again, as great as Ginobili's competitive spirit is, his body has betrayed him enough to give him the consensus label of "injury prone".  While few guards can stay in front of Tony Parker, he's not one you would expect to take over a game for you.  Despite being arguably the best transition guard in the game, you cannot win a series purely on the transition game alone.

Where does that leave us?  Expectations have certainly been high, but have we really just been deluding ourselves into nostalgic dreams of grandeur?  A lot of pundits and fans would say yes.  I think we can squeeze one more good run out of this team though, and while there have been pleasant surprises, there have been drastic disappointments.  Richard Jefferson was never the game changer we needed him to be.  Certainly, he's filled into his Sean Elliott/Bruce Bowen/Michael Finley type role quite nicely, but unlike either Elliott or Finley before him, Jefferson certainly has not taken over any game.  Gary Neal has been a stellar find but let's be realistic, isn't he just a marginal upgrade over Roger Mason?  Am I asking for the impossible?  Maybe.  I know we probably won't get another star in the near future.  Few players these days want to play for an old-school small-market franchise, even if it is one of the best franchises in the league for the past decade.

We had the best record in the regular season, and as the Cleveland and Dallas have shown us, that means little in the post season.  It's easy to lament things past at this point in time, but in the face of another humbling playoff exit, we really have to ask ourselves: do we have what it takes to win a 7 game series?  Maybe it's a mental thing, but my call is just that we're seeing really how precariously built this Spurs team was in the first place.  I hate to say it, but: I told you so.

Best Record Beware: Does Barkley know what he's talking about?

There are a couple of things I'd like to go through on this specific post, and I'm kind of juggling ideas of how exactly I go about doing that while I'm actually writing this.  Somewhat unprofessional, I know, but not being a journalist, I'm okay with ditching professionalism for colloquialism.  So there are a number of things that spurred this post.  One of the major ones was a statement made by Charles Barkley:

"I got Dallas and the Lakers ahead of the Spurs to be honest with you.  To be honest with you, if the season ended today I think Oklahoma City can beat the Spurs because I think the Spurs are a little overrated to be honest with you because I think they play very hard, they play very smart but I think they are missing a big guy to be honest with you.  Tim Duncan is struggling on the downside of his career but I just don’t think they don’t get enough easy baskets because their two best players are Parker and Ginobili, and I love Ginobili, but I believe in jump shooters being your go-to guy to be honest, that was my only knock on Oklahoma City.  I always tell people you don’t win with jump shots.  They have gotten better around the basket defensively but I think Dallas and the Lakers are the two best teams in the West." 

Now, when I actually sit down and read that, it's really confusing to me, but I think I get the gist of it.   I think.  Essentially, Barkley is saying that despite the league best record, the Spurs aren't his favorites to win a championship, which can be a legitimate statement.  It was only in 2007 that we saw the league-best 67-15 Dallas Mavericks embarrassingly ousted from the first round of the playoffs by the Cinderella We Believe Golden State Warriors, lead by Baron Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Jason Richardson.  We saw in 2009 66-16 Cleveland Cavaliers get destroyed by a Hedo Turkoglu and Dwight Howard pick-and-roll in the Eastern Conference Finals and then in 2010 the 61-21 Cavaliers saw LeBron James check out during the second round against the Boston Celtics.  So if we've learned anything from history, we do know that regular season record isn't necessarily indicative of anything.  In 2006 the 64-18 Detroit Pistons were upset by the Miami Heat, led by Dwayne Wade and Shaquille O'Neal in the Eastern Conference Finals.  So that means in the last 5 years, only the 66-16 Boston Celtics of 2008 both held the NBA league-best record AND won a championship.  That's not to say that there is a negative correlation, but rather, that they are probably less related than one might initially imagine.  Fair enough.

That brings me to the second point though, which is where Barkley thinks that all these other teams are ahead of the Spurs, which I'm not entirely sure about.  While it's fair to say that on paper, Lakers have an edge, I don't know that you can definitively declare the Spurs patently "worse" than the Mavericks and Lakers considering that the Spurs at worse can split the season with either team, having already beaten both teams twice out of their annual four meetings.  I mean, on paper, sure, the Lakers and Mavericks "look" better, but that isn't always telling.  I mean, seriously, when was the last time the Spurs "looked good" on paper?  2003? Yet with all these no-name players and journeymen and such, the Spurs have managed to cobble together consecutive playoff appearances and 4 championships since Duncan's rookie year in 1998.  However, I can still see that just based on intuition how Barkley would pick the Lakers over the Spurs (though maybe it's bias that causes me to dislike the Mavericks and wonder how anyone could think that team is good).  Let's look at all these teams that Barkley likes over the Spurs:

	SPURS	LAKERS	MAVERICKS	THUNDER
PG	Tony Parker	Derek Fisher	Jason Kidd	Russell Westbrook
SG	Manu Ginobili	Kobe Bryant	Rodrigue Beaubois	Thabo Sefolosha
SF	Richard Jefferson	Ron Artest	Peja Stojakovic	Kevin Durant
PF	DeJuan Blair	Pau Gasol	Dirk Nowitzki	Serge Ibaka
C	Tim Duncan	Andrew Bynum	Tyson Chandler	Kendrick Perkins
G-3	George Hill	Steve Blake	J.J. Barea	Eric Maynor
G-4	Gary Neal	Shannon Brown	Jason Terry	James Harden
F-3	James Anderson	Matt Barnes	DeShawn Stevenson	Daequan Cook
F-4	Antonio McDyess	Lamar Odom	Shawn Marion	Nick Collison
C-2	Tiago Splitter	Joe Smith	Brendan Haywood	Nazr Mohammed
Res	Matt Bonner	Luke Walton	Ian Mahinmi	Cole Aldrich
Res	Chris Quinn	Devin Ebanks	Brian Cardinal	Nate Robinson

On paper, I can kind of see where he's going.  I mean, the Lakers do have the formidable frontcourt rotation of Gasol/Bynum/Odom to continually deal with, and of course the machine that is Kobe Bryant.  Additionally, Blake and Barnes aren't significant steps down from Fisher (which I know isn't saying much) and Artest.  Now, I am somewhat predisposed to disliking Dirk, so maybe I underrate him a little, but with an aging Kidd and Marion and a shooter as streaky as Jason Terry, it's hard to say that an equal number of things has to right for the Mavericks as it does for the Spurs to win a 7 game series against any one of these teams.  Granted Tyson Chandler is the 7 foot interior defensive anchor that Erick Dampier never was and Dirk never will be, but can we really say that Beaubois and Barea are significantly better than Hill and Neal?  As for OKC, while adding Perkins and Mohammed give them one of the better defensive frontcourt rotations of Ibaka/Perkins/Collison/Mohammed, paired with the ultra-effective pairing of Westbrook and Durant, I can see this being a very good team.  I can understand who they might be considered a contender now, but first, Perkins needs to get back healthy, until then we have to reserve our judgment.  I wouldn't want to play any of these teams in the playoffs, but do I think we have a legitimate chance of beating each one?  Yes.  Certainly, "anything can happen" does apply in the playoffs, especially with teams as good as these four, but blanket statements like "I have the Lakers and Mavericks ahead of the Spurs because I think they can beat the Spurs in a 7 game series."  are just kind of ignorant, because on the flip side, it's so close that the Spurs could just as easily win said 7 game series.

Which kind of leads my rambling to my last point, which is simply, I don't think Charles Barkley has watched a Spurs game.  Essentially, he labelled Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili "jump shooters" and went on to say, "you don't win with jump shots".  Okay, fair enough.  76% of Ginobili's shot attempts are categorized as jump shots on 82games.com, but so are 81% of Kobe Bryant's, 86% of Kevin Durant's, and 88% of Dirk Nowitzki's shot attempts, furthermore, Tony Parker only has about 52% of his shots categorized as jump shots, so essentially, the go-to guys on the Spurs are less jump shooters than all the other teams.  That was a lot of numbers, let's see if a chart can help:

	Tony Parker	Manu Ginobili	Kobe Bryant	Pau Gasol	Dirk Nowitzki	Jason Terry	Kevin Durant	Russell Westbrook
% jump shot	58%	76%	81%	55%	88%	88%	86%	63%
% close	42%	22%	17%	34%	11%	11%	8%	33%
% dunk	0%	1%	1%	5%	1%	1%	6%	4%
% tip	0%	1%	0%	0%	0%	0%	1%	1%
% inside	42%	24%	19%	45%	12%	12%	14%	37%

Okay, so the premise is that the more shots you take inside, the easier the two points are.  Well, if that's the case, the Spurs get the most easy shots for its two stars.  I mean, the Mavericks are pretty much just jump shooters other than Tyson Chandler.  If jump shooting doesn't win, then the Mavericks shouldn't really be that good right?  Maybe I'm just confusing myself now.  Anyways.  My point is this, the Spurs may not be the clear favorites, but they have to be in the talk.  My take is that given all the ups and downs of this year, you can't really count them out, and there is no definitive favorite.  My other point is that Charles Barkley has either a) never watched a Spurs game, b) very ignorant about the Spurs' players, or c) all of the above.  That being said, I've never really taken Chuck too seriously when it comes to legitimate basketball talk, so I'm not going to start now.