Team Dreams 2K19: The Persistence of the Spurs
The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of Tim Duncan lives forever
All things crumble and die. There is no object, no living creature, no work of humankind which will remain eternal. Life fades. Matter crumbles. Time will see suns burn out and the universe unmake itself as entropy conquers all. The San Antonio Spurs will perish, then they will rot, then they will fade into dust like the rest of us. That day, however, will not be today, nor will it be tomorrow. The Spurs are as close as we can get to witnessing eternity, living even as their dynasty has perished. Fear the undead Spurs, long may they molder.
Since the last San Antonio Spurs Championship in 2014, the Spurs have turned over nearly their entire roster. For a team to change over six years is little surprise, but the extent to which the Spurs lineup differs is staggering. Only Patty Mills remains from those salad days. It’s easy to understand why, however. Their previous window was not a couple years, but a couple decades. In fact, it was the entirety of Tim Duncan’s career as a player. The 2014 championship was remarkable in that it came fifteen years after the first championship won by the same foundational star.
The tenure of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker was already being supported past their scheduled demise by determination, steadfastness and a once-in-a-lifetime player in Kawhi Leonard. Head Coach Gregg Popovich has stewarded the team since the drafting of Tim Duncan, a tenure which somehow, incredibly, continues to this day. The Spurs did the same thing for twenty years and they won five championships doing it. It’s no wonder they kept at it for several years more. The only shock is that anyone ever actually retired.
Now, with the team led by unlikely misfits LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan, coach Pop continues to grind out wins for the silver and black, accompanied byTim Duncan yet again. Duncan has begun a career on the coaching staff, and it seems almost a forgone conclusion that he should remain on the sidelines for decades longer, extending the Spurs’ identity as a calming, even boring influence on the league ad infinitum.
This Spurs team is not a championship team. Those years are over, fallen to the ground like the trunk which once sat atop the two vast legs of stone. But the monument still stands, asking us to look on their works, and despair. As long as Popovich and his progeny, such as Tim Duncan and WNBA legend Becky Hammon, sit on the sideline, and as long as RC Buford continues to manage the front office, we cannot discount this team. The timeline of NBA player viability should have doomed them long ago.
They persist, even in death.
They should not be able to make the playoffs every season with a changing and increasingly unproven roster. They do it, nonetheless. Their floor has fallen from fifty wins per season to something more like forty-seven, a feat which is as astonishing as it is pedestrian. They have made routine something that many teams and players aspire to for decades. The Spurs have flattened out glory and built not a shrine to themselves, but a home that seems likely to stand for eons.
We have no idea they will continue to hew to this path. Every year seems like the season in which they will finally, mercifully, miss the playoffs. The ongoing presence of the Spurs in the league feels as certain as the sun, and this ongoing lack of contendership might be the final setting of that sun, or it might simply be a passing cloud before Lonnie Walker IV or Dejounte Murray or some future draft pick metamorphoses into their new exemplar, clearing the sky yet again.
The Spurs are the closest thing we will see to eternity in the NBA. We simply have no idea when the chain will be broken, if ever. Much has changed in the NBA, even the Spurs themselves. Patty Mills will one day leave the employ of the Spurs, and at last there will be no more 2014 champions on the roster.
That doesn’t matter. The Spurs have not released their grip on the team they were in 1999, when they won their first title. The names and the stadia may change, as will the other teams around them. They settled into themselves long ago and will not and need not change. Pray that they never finally let go, that Popovich and his legacy continue forever. They are a north star for the NBA and its fans, a light in the sky that refuses to be swallowed by the entropy which will yet claim it one day.
The Spurs have held off the call of the grave longer than they have any right to, and not nearly as long as we need them to. None of us will live forever. All of us will one day slip away, leaving only a legacy which will one day slip away as well. Like the Spurs, we cannot hold time back forever. In making a daily exercise of holding their legacy together, they give us not just an exemplary basketball team and a group of players we can watch and root for. The Spurs give us an example of how to achieve immortality. Long live the San Antonio Spurs. Long live us all.
