Continuing...
The San Antonio Spurs are a basketball team, not a soap opera.
The question is: In this day and age of trash talk, televised street ball, personality-driven marketing and preening and gloating after baskets, is solid basketball enough?
It's certainly enough to win the N.B.A. championship, as the Spurs proved by capturing their second title in five years last season. But is it enough to captivate the hearts of fans and viewers outside of San Antonio the way, say, the Los Angeles Lakers have?
"We're just vanilla," swingman Bruce Bowen said after San Antonio snapped the Lakers' 11-game winning streak last month. "Whereas the Lakers are Chunky Monkey or something like that."
The two flavors will collide today in San Antonio in Game 1 of their four-of-seven-game Western Conference semifinal series. Many analysts say the series will determine this season's champion. It will be the fifth playoff meeting in six years for the clubs, which have combined to win the past five N.B.A. titles.
San Antonio won last year's second-round series, four games to two, but one wonders if Commissioner David Stern is privately rooting for the Lakers, considering how the nation tuned out the Spurs' 4-2 victory over the Nets in last season's finals.
The series against the Nets, the most competitive finals since Chicago beat Utah in 1998, was the lowest-rated title series since the networks stopped showing the finals on tape delay in 1981.
"They play an efficient game that isn't pleasing to the eye in terms of having high fliers," Kenny Smith, the TNT analyst and former player, said of the Spurs. "They don't have guys who make spectacular plays on a regular basis. They're more of a grind-it-out team. They're very similar to those old Detroit Pistons teams, without the attitude. If you take away the attitude of the Detroit Pistons and take the Bad Boy name off of them, that's what you've got — the Spurs."
Like the Spurs, the Pistons' championship teams of 1989 and 1990 had one superstar and a terrific supporting cast. But their superstar, Isiah Thomas, was one of the game's most exciting players. The Spurs' Tim Duncan is one of the game's greatest players, but neither his game nor his laid-back personality can be described as electrifying.
Moreover, Duncan does not go out of his way to engage the news media. He is accommodating and polite, but he will never make comments as the sometime-rapper Shaquille O'Neal did after making the winning basket against Houston two weeks ago — "a hero ain't nothing but a sandwich, and I'm trying to give up carbohydrates."
The N.B.A. is telling itself that Duncan is beginning to come out of his shell. The belief is based on his entertaining commercial with Julius Erving in which a distraught Duncan lies on a couch confessing his love for the Larry O'Brien championship trophy. "I'm a pretty emotional guy, Doc," Duncan says in a play on his typically stoic demeanor.
The commercial, part of the league's campaign to promote the playoffs, has been so popular that a second one with Duncan and Erving is in the works.
There are other indications that fans may be embracing the Spurs. Duncan's jersey, the 15th-best seller last season, was No. 6 this season. And the Spurs ranked eighth in team merchandise sold at the N.B.A. Store as well as on NBA.com. Last season, they were not in the top 10.
Duncan seems not to care about his popularity, though, and his indifference toward hype and hoopla rubs off on his teammates.
"I know Tim doesn't give a darn about all that stuff," said Steve Kerr, a TNT analyst who won titles with the Spurs in 1999 and 2003. "He just wants to win, and for the most part that's the way it is with all those guys. That's one of the reasons they're so good — because they focus on what it takes to win and nothing else."
The Spurs have been nothing if not focused lately. Although the squabbling Lakers are far too talented to be counted out, there is no question that the Spurs are entering this series as the league's hottest team.
They have won 15 consecutive games, including their four-game sweep of Memphis in the first round. Their average margin of victory in those games was 14.5 points, and they have not lost a home game that Duncan has played in since Jan. 29.
"I picked the Lakers to win it all at the beginning of the season, but they've had too much turmoil and they're too inconsistent," Kerr said. "Now I think the Spurs are the better team and I think they're going to win. They're so much more solid than the Lakers night in and night out."
San Antonio Coach Gregg Popovich likes to say the Spurs are not the defending champions because they have had so much roster turnover. The starters David Robinson and Stephen Jackson, and the key reserves Speedy Claxton, Danny Ferry, Steve Smith and Kerr are gone, replaced by Rasho Nesterovic, Hedo Turkoglu, Robert Horry and Jason Hart.
The core of Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginóbili and Bowen remains, and after a sluggish 9-10 start, the Spurs have not missed a beat. This season's team is more athletic than San Antonio's two previous title winners, and Popovich has capitalized on that by incorporating more motion into the offense.
The Spurs won their first championship, and to a lesser degree their second, by mimicking the Rockets' game plan when Hakeem Olajuwon led them to titles in 1994 and 1995. With Duncan and Robinson inside, they passed the ball down low, waited for defenses to double-team, then buried them with 3-point shooting.
This season, there is more movement, and the pick-and-roll has become a staple. That pick-and-roll could be the Lakers' undoing because O'Neal has trouble guarding it and Parker has the quickness to get past Gary Payton, who joined the Lakers in the off-season along with another star veteran, Karl Malone. "I can't wait to play L.A.," Parker said.
Defensively, the Spurs are as stifling as always with two shot-blockers in Duncan and Nesterovic and the lock-down artist, Bowen, at small forward. Bowen was such a nuisance this season that several players accused him of playing dirty.
No one can be expected to shut down Kobe Bryant, the player openly disdainful of Coach Phil Jackson, but Bowen can contain him as well as anyone. As for excitement, well, the Spurs can at least offer Parker, one of the game's quickest players, and Ginóbili, who comes off the bench behind Turkoglu and Bowen. Ginóbili, a 6-foot-6 swingman from Argentina, is one of the league's more acrobatic players, capable of snatching away the ball on defense and slicing to the hoop on offense.
Whereas Bowen will make Bryant work on offense, Ginóbili will make him hustle on defense.
Still, whether San Antonio beats the Lakers and whether viewers embrace the Spurs will depend on Duncan, who lifts the team with his ability and keeps it grounded with his personality.
"There's a disparity between guys who can sell product and guys who win games," Kenny Smith said. "Tim Duncan is the latter. He might not sell as many products, but he wins a lot of games."
The Lakers, with all their drama and charisma, are an easy sell. But can they win against Duncan and the Spurs?
