Tag: Tim Duncan

Yahoo story broaches TD’s eventual retirement

It’s a day that Spurs Nation is dreading. 

Tim Duncan’s retirement will be an eventuality — like it is with every professional athlete. 

As he has experienced a renaissance this year in his 15th season, Duncan has showed no signs of slowing down.

An intensive and rigorous off-season conditioning program has helped him improve his scoring and rebounding averages from last year. 

Duncan’s dunks are up as it appears he is more spry. The Spurs captain recently had an 18-game stretch of consecutive double-figure scoring games. It came during a time when the Spurs were the league’s hottest team over the last two months.

Yahoo Sports NBA writer Marc Spears recently talked to Duncan about his retirement, a subject that Duncan told him.”

Duncan told Spears that he hasn’t had any health concerns in the lockout season.   

“I thought I prepared well and was in great shape coming in,” Duncan told Yahoo. “I’ve felt good throughout.”

The Spurs’ recent surge has helped keep Duncan’s competitive juices flowing with 26 victories in their last 31 games. He’s seen the team’s core rebuilt with nine players with a maximum of two seasons of NBA experience, including three rookies.

“It’s fun having a bunch of new guys, seeing them interact,” Duncan said. “You feel like the old guy sometimes. But I got some old heads with me, too, so it’s good.”

Those would include veteran teammates Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker and Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who has the longest coaching tenure in the league. 

Parker and Popovich had some interesting comments for Spears about Duncan’s eventual retirement. 

“He doesn’t know how many years he wants to play,” Parker told Yahoo. “But it’s going to be weird the day he retires. It’s going to be very different in San Antonio.”

It also promises to be an emotional day for Popovich, Duncan’s only professional head coach.

“We’ve been together for so long. Fifteen years now,” Popovich told Yahoo. “It has gone through my head, but I don’t allow myself to think about what that’s going to mean. I’ll just deal with it when it happens.”

Duncan is making $21.1 million per season in his contract which will expire after the season and it’s hard to believe that he won’t re-sign with the team. 

If his performance approaches this season, he likely has several more years of productive play in front of him.

Popovich unapologetic for resting aging stars

OAKLAND, Calif. — The Spurs open their second and final back-to-back-to-back of the season tonight at Golden State.

That means at some point over the next three nights, coach Gregg Popovich will likely draw the ire of basketball purists, talking heads and fantasy geeks everywhere.

Though Popovich has announced no definitive plan to rest players on the whirlwind trip to visit Golden State, the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento, 30-somethings Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Stephen Jackson — as well as soon-to-be 30-something Tony Parker — would be wise to pack a sport coat just in case.

Popovich’s penchant for sidelining perfectly healthy players in the name of rest and relaxation has taken fire from two fronts.

One is from those who argue along “integrity of the game” lines. When Popovich chose not to take any of his Big Three on the road to Utah last week, for instance, it helped the Jazz get a win vital to their pursuit of the Western Conference’s final playoff seed, artificially affecting the race.

Popovich’s counter-argument? If a team is unhappy with its playoff lot, it should have won more games.

“I think people should mostly take care of their own business and end up where they end up based on how well they play, not based on other people,” Popovich said.

Popovich harbors more sympathy for fans who plunk down their hard-earned cash to watch an NBA game, only to have a D-League contest break out.

After Popovich sat four players in Portland in February, he received a disgruntled letter from such a fan.

“I understand completely,” Popovich said. “I would feel exactly the same. If I went to watch Miami, and LeBron (James) and Dwyane (Wade) weren’t playing, I’d feel shorted.

“It’s natural human reaction and totally understandable, but I have a different priority. I have a different responsibility, and that rules for me.”

Jedi mind trick: The last time the Spurs faced a back-to-back-to-back, from March 23-25, Popovich sat Duncan, Ginobili and Parker one game apiece.

The Spurs swept the set from Dallas, New Orleans and Philadelphia anyway, becoming the fifth team to win three games in three nights this season.

Might Popovich approach this trip the same way?

“You never know what Obi-Wan’s going to do,” Jackson said. “At the end of the day, everybody’s going to have to be ready.”

Green clocks out: Starting shooting guard Danny Green did not play in the second half Saturday against Phoenix, as Popovich opted to replace him with Ginobili to start the third quarter.

Though Green has been playing much of the year with a sore left shoulder, the move had nothing to do with an injury, Popovich said.

“He’s been playing a lot,” Popovich said. “It was a good opportunity to give him a bit of a rest.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net

Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN

Classic Duncan rewind keeps Spurs going strong

By Jeff McDonald

The brace strapped to Tim Duncan’s left knee has become a semi-permanent accoutrement, like an unwelcome piece of his wardrobe.

The Spurs’ power forward wears it on the court and often off of it, to play and to practice but also to watch cartoons with his kids.

There have been whispers in NBA circles about the level of degeneration in that knee, and questions about how many more years Duncan, less than two weeks from blowing out the candles on birthday No. 36, can continue to play on it.

Even on days when the pain is at its worst, Duncan’s teammates have never heard him complain — about the knee or any of the other natural aches that come with being a 30-something still toiling at a kids’ game.

“He’s not one that’s going to be crying about it,” guard Manu Ginobili said.

In the throes of his 15th NBA season, Duncan has been content to let his play serve as his daily medical report.

He says he is feeling well enough to make a run at a fifth NBA championship. And when it comes to Duncan, longtime teammates say, seeing is believing.

Just check the game tape.

“We’ve seen a few dunks in traffic lately,” Ginobili said. “He’s running in transition better. You can see he’s really feeling good.”

Since the All-Star break, Duncan is averaging close to 17 points and 10 rebounds. He has 30 dunks, already surpassing what he racked up in a full 82 games last season.

Duncan is coming off a 28-point, 12-rebound opus in Thursday’s victory over Memphis that rates as one of his top performances of the season.

It would be gross hyperbole to suggest that Duncan has at times resembled the two-time MVP winner from early last decade. But that hasn’t stopped some from suggesting it.

“Out of the last three years, this is the best I’ve seen him move and play,” said forward Stephen Jackson, a member of the Spurs’ 2003 title team. “He’s definitely showing flashes of the old Tim from when I was here last time.”

Duncan is in the final season of the contract extension he signed four months after the 2007 NBA Finals. He is not expected to meet with Spurs management to discuss his future plans until after the playoffs.

Heading down the home stretch of April — which continues tonight with a visit from a Phoenix team that has played foil for some of Duncan’s best games — the greatest player in Spurs history doesn’t appear to be in line for a retirement pension any time soon.

Like Suns point guard Steve Nash, on pace to again lead the NBA in assists at the overripe age of 38, Duncan is enjoying the fruits of a lockout-shortened campaign.

His numbers per 36 minutes — 19.2 points, 11.5 rebounds — are nearly identical to what he produced in 2005-06, at age 30.

“Timmy’s had a really fine year,” said coach Gregg Popovich, who calls it an oversight that Duncan was left off the All-Star team for the first time in his career. “(Against Memphis), he surpassed that. He stepped it up to a whole other level. He was phenomenal.”

It was a far cry from last April, when Duncan — hobbling through a failed playoff series against the Grizzlies on a bad knee and an ankle sprained late in the regular season — seemed a few weeks away from being fitted for a Rascal and AARP card.

This season, a refreshed Duncan has the Spurs within one victory of clinching their 18th division title and in position to claim the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference for the second straight season.

With Popovich meticulously rationing his minutes, and occasionally giving him a night off (once under the infamous heading of “DND-Old”), Duncan has discovered a fountain of youth.

“I feel good,” Duncan said. “I’ve felt good all year.”

His teammates believe him. No stranger to the injury list himself, Ginobili does not discount the mental value of playing pain free.

“That changes everything for a player,” Ginobili said. “When you are healthy, your head stops thinking about that and starts thinking about the game. That’s an important thing.”

For Duncan, there are still nine games left in the regular season, plus a playoff run to navigate.

After that, he will turn his attention toward next season. Though he hasn’t committed to anything, most expect Duncan — health willing — to delay retirement and re-up for another tour of duty with the only NBA team he has ever known.

For a few years now, Duncan has offered the same boilerplate response when asked the same inevitable question about how long he intends to keep playing:

“Until the wheels fall off.”

With his wheels firmly in place for now, Duncan keeps quietly rolling on.

jmcdonald @express-news.net
Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN