Author: katadmin

Spurs’ ‘wonderful season’ leads to summer uncertainty

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

The old champion sat in the corner locker at the FedEx Forum late Friday night, vanquished and spent. He performed his perfunctory media obligations, answering in a low tone a few questions about one of the most disappointing playoff ousters of his Hall of Fame career.

And then, Tim Duncan stood up, walked toward the door and into the most uncertain offseason of his life.

On his way to the bus, the Spurs forward recognized a familiar face and paused with one more thought.

“Looks like we got an offensive tackle,” Duncan said, referring to the NFL draft and his beloved Chicago Bears. “We needed two.”

With the season finished more quickly than anyone could have surmised, and the possibility of a lockout postponing the start of his 14th season, Duncan will have plenty of time to ponder both the future and football.

By becoming the second No. 8 seed in the best-of-7 era to topple a No. 1, the Memphis Grizzlies spoiled what was supposed to be Duncan’s last, best run to a fifth NBA championship.

“With the seeding and the situation, I think we’re a better team than we showed,” said Duncan, who turned 35 this month. “I thought we could have put together a much better series.”

In a brutally effective six-game march, capped with a 99-91 victory in Game 6, Memphis brought an unceremonious end to a season in which the Spurs defied expectations, for better and worse.

Nobody imagined a 61-win regular season, the second-best of the Duncan era, during which the Spurs led the NBA for 70 games. Nobody imagined they would flame out as a top seed in the first round, because it had so rarely happened before.

“It was a disappointing end to a wonderful season,” coach Gregg Popovich said Saturday, after the team conducted its year-end meetings.

For the second time in three postseasons, the Spurs failed to advance to the second round. At four years now without an NBA title, it marks the longest drought of Duncan’s career.

Give the Grizzlies credit. Their hard-nosed defense, led by Tony Allen and Shane Battier and a group of castoffs, flummoxed what had been the most offensively potent team of the Popovich era.

By the end of the series, it didn’t even seem like an upset.

“We lost to a team that played better than us for more of the minutes,” said guard Manu Ginobili, who turns 34 in June. “We went through a great season and got in a position to win 61 games, but we couldn’t maintain that high level.”

In autopsying the season Saturday, Popovich blamed April injuries to Duncan and Ginobili for throwing off the Spurs’ groove heading into the playoffs. The Spurs were 57-13 before Duncan went down, 4-8 after.

“We didn’t really go into the playoffs with that rhythm and that mojo you want,” Popovich said. “We think things could have had a different look if we’d had that rhythm going in, but it never did get there.

“Confidence is a big deal in the playoffs. We thought we could overcome it, but Memphis had to cooperate — and they did not.”

It is difficult to imagine the Spurs having an easier time next season.

With a landlocked payroll, there isn’t much general manager R.C. Buford can do to remake the roster. The NBA draft, in which the Spurs possess the 29th pick for what is considered to be a historically shallow prospect pool, is unlikely to be of much help.

Antonio McDyess, the 36-year-old center who spent much of the series battered by Memphis’ bruising Zach Randolph, plans to retire.

“We’re not going to fight him,” Popovich said.

Duncan is entering the final year of his contract but has the option of forgoing the roughly $21.2 million he is owed to sign a longer-term deal at a lower starting price, as Richard Jefferson did last summer. That could give the Spurs a bit of financial wiggle room to chase free agents.

“There will be some changes, but we never get drastic in that sense,” Popovich said. “Somebody asked me yesterday, ‘We lost, do we blow it up’?? That’s the most preposterous attitude you can have.”

Whatever the offseason holds, winning 60 games again next season will be a tall order, and — in a Western Conference in which the eighth seed can beat the first — simply making the playoffs will be a chore.

The apocalypse scenario for Spurs fans remains a lockout that erases the entire final year of Duncan’s deal, after which he could walk away for good.

Duncan was in no mood to consider that possibility after Game 6.

“I just lost a game,” Duncan said. “I’m not even worried about any of that stuff.”

Between now and the tenuous start of the 2011-12 campaign, there will be time to think about roster overhauls, and time to debate the future and, maybe, to ponder the end of an era.

Too much time, if you ask the Spurs.

Grizzlies are slight favorites in Game 4

Las Vegas oddsmakers have made Memphis a slight favorite for tonight’s game at the FedExForum.

According to the compendium of  odds collected by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Grizzlies are a at each of the four gambling sites that they survey.

The opening line for Monday’s game started with Memphis favored by one point. It soon increased to the current pointspread after an early rush of money on the Grizzlies.

The Grizzlies were a 2½-point favorite in Saturday’s game. San Antonio was favored in each of the first two games of  the series.

Buck Harvey: Blank no more: Memphis’ rise, luck

Chris Wallace stayed behind in Memphis for Game 1. The general manager of the Grizzlies had a few things to do, such as work on a new contract for Zach Randolph.

So he’s watching the game Sunday afternoon, living and dying with every possession — when his satellite transmission goes out with about a minute left.

Wallace is searching for another broadcast, frantic with every passing second, until the game returns with 10 seconds left. Given what happened in that time, maybe nothing better describes the current status of Wallace and his franchise.

From a blank screen to the startling news.

You mean everything worked out?

Wallace laughed while telling the story Monday. Few GMs are as accessible and as affable.

Now he has reason to share even more, because February of 2008 seems so long ago. That’s when Wallace traded Pau Gasol to the Lakers, and criticism flowed toward Memphis as relentlessly as the Mississippi.

“What they did,” Gregg Popovich notably said then, “is beyond comprehension.”

NBA execs rarely critique each other this way. After all, if Wallace wanted, he could evaluate the Spurs.

Such as: Isn’t it beyond comprehension they discarded Luis Scola for money?

But Wallace didn’t fire back. “I said at the time, the Lakers got their benefit from the first day Pau suited up,” he said. “Ours was delayed gratification.”

There would be delays, all right, and Wallace didn’t control all of it. He’s not unlike Bob Bass, the former Spurs general manager, who served under hyperactive owners. Wallace is sometimes a GM, but he’s sometimes a powerless observer, too.

This goes back a few years. When he worked in Boston, he wanted to draft an unknown from France named Tony Parker. Red Auerbach, fading but still with the influence of a legend, wanted an American kid who eventually flopped.

The Grizzlies owner, Michael Heisley, has been more involved than Auerbach. Heisley gets the blame for drafting Hasheem Thabeet, as well as thinking Allen Iverson would be a swell fit.

Heisley is a self-made millionaire with self-made wounds. But it was Wallace who put together the Pau deal, and that was the move that came to define a confused franchise.

Popovich wasn’t the only one who rolled his eyes. Lionel Hollins, for example, wasn’t employed by the Grizzlies then. Asked how he saw the deal at the time, he was candid Monday.

“They probably could have gotten more,” Hollins said.

But everything worked out, right?

“Sometimes the worst thing can become the best,” Hollins said. “This league is all about luck.”

Hollins said people apply the word “genius” to those who make the right guess. Others would have taken Thabeet, he said, and some teams passed on Michael Jordan.

The Spurs have often admitted as much. They’ve been held up as innovators and professionals, and the Spurs Way has produced championships. But they had luck, too; if they knew Manu Ginobili would be this good, they wouldn’t have waited until the bottom of the second round to take him.

Wallace argues there was more than luck. Memphis had a plan, and it was a valid one. “Pau’s been like an NBA version of an organ donor,” he said, “with how he’s provided life to this current team.”

It requires a spreadsheet to keep up with all of the transactions that came from the Pau trade, but this much is certain: The Grizzlies have the core of their team, Marc Gasol and Randolph, because of the Pau trade.

Did they know Marc would someday have a better playoff afternoon than his brother? Did they foresee Randolph not only becoming available, but also being a perfect fit?

No and no. But both are Grizzlies because Pau is not, and Popovich has another reason not to like the 2008 trade.

About a year ago, when it was clear the Grizzlies were on to something, Popovich softened his stance. “I was just trying to be a wise-ass,” he said of his previous comments.

But Wallace never heard from Popovich personally, and he’s okay with that.

“I never took any offense,” he said. “I have so much respect for him and R.C. (Buford). There’s no question they have created the finest organization in the league.”

It’s easier to be forgiving now. With a 1-0 series lead on the finest organization in the league.

bharvey@express-news.net