Tag: Gregg Popovich

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.

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

Grizzlies eliminate No. 1 seed Spurs in six games

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — On the last night of the Spurs’ season, and most likely his career, Antonio McDyess was sitting in his locker at FedEx Forum before Game 6 on Friday, reliving one shining moment.

On the screen in front of him, Gary Neal had just buried a 3-pointer to send Game 5 into overtime.

“Crazy,” McDyess said, as if watching it for the first time.

Friday night in Memphis, there would be no more miracles. There would not be enough craziness for the Spurs to force a Game 7.

In fact, when the eighth-seeded Grizzlies just did what they do — grinding out a 99-91 victory to oust the top-seeded Spurs — it didn’t seem crazy at all.

It didn’t even seem like an upset.

Zach Randolph had 31 points and 11 rebounds, taking over the fourth quarter, to lift the Grizzlies to the second round for the first time in franchise history. Memphis will face fourth-seeded Oklahoma City in the Western Conference semifinals starting Sunday.

“They were the better team,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “They played better than we did in the stretch of six games.”

In doing so, Memphis pushed the Spurs into an exclusive and unwanted club, joining them with the 2007 Dallas Mavericks as the only No. 1 seeds in NBA history to lose a best-of-7 series in the first round.

Tony Parker had 23 points, while Manu Ginobili added 16 and Duncan had 12 points and 10 rebounds. But the Spurs, as had been the case for most of a first-round series that felt like a barroom brawl, could not overcome Memphis’ sheer tenacity and physicality.

“They played their asses off,” Popovich said.

For a moment, midway through the fourth, the Spurs seemed poised to pull another rabbit out of another hat.

It started with Ginobili making another Hail Mary, this one from 49 feet at the third-quarter horn, providing the Spurs hope that the fates were still with them after their overtime victory in Game 5.

After trailing for nearly every second of the game, and by as many as 14 in the first quarter, the Spurs took an 80-79 lead on McDyess’ jumper with 4:41 to play. The rugged Grizzlies, with an orneriness mirrored best by pugnacious coach Lionel Hollins, would not let the Spurs have a Game 7.

Hollins called timeout, and Randolph took over. In the next 2:30, Randolph scored 10 points, beckoning the Grizzlies to ride to the second round on his back.

“We rode him like he was an English war horse,” Hollins said.

Said Randolph, who scored 17 in the fourth: “I just wanted to get the ball in my hands and get into the paint.”

While Randolph was a one-man wrecking crew, Memphis buckled down on defense, doing what the championship-era Spurs used to do in tense postseason moments: Get stops on demand.

By the time the Spurs surfaced for air, Memphis had taken a 91-82 lead with 1:11 to play.

The list of what the Spurs squandered — or, perhaps more accurately, what the Grizzlies took from them — is a long one.

Sixty-one victories. The Western Conference’s top seed. Optimism that, perhaps, Duncan’s Spurs might be positioned for one more championship run.

Instead, they left the FedEx Forum vanquished amid a hail of streamers, headed early into an uncertain offseason that could be made longer by looming labor strife.

For McDyess, who is leaning strongly toward retiring this summer, it could be the end of a 16-year career.

“We played well all season long,” Parker said. “It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t play well in the playoffs.”

Even as the Spurs lamented all that was lost, and with Popovich off to have “dinner and a Gatorade,” they had to appreciate what Memphis had accomplished.

Casting off their winless playoff history, the Grizzlies went from the lottery to the second round in one season. And they went through the No. 1 seed to get there.

Crazy indeed.