Spurring Success

It's pretty ironic. The buttoned-down San Antonio Spurs, who have always emphasized team over individual and sought function over dysfunction, have wantonly and willfully defied the natural order.

By resisting the ebb and flow endemic to all professional sports franchises, their twenty-two consecutive winning seasons has exploded convention and impaled the notion of gravity on a wrought iron spike of obstreperousness.

You should know it is the fifth-longest such streak in U.S. professional sports history. And the longest ever in the NBA. Put down your phone and think about that for a moment. The last time Spurs fans endured a losing season was in the winter of 1996/97.

Bill Clinton was president. There was no Google, no Twitter, no Facebook. There was no texting. If you were one of the 36% of American homes with a personal computer, you could send an e-mail via AmericaOnline.

We used keys to unlock our cars. CD players to listen to music. And no one would ever think of mounting the big, console TVs we used to watch ER and Seinfeld on the wall.

Consider that within this span the Shaq 'N Kobe Lakers rose—and fell. LeBron James justified the hype and ended Cleveland's fifty-year-old championship drought. Dwyane Wade led two separate editions of the Miami Heat to three titles. And the then-New Jersey Nets visited the NBA Finals—twice.

Dirk Nowitzki led the Dallas Mavericks to a decade of dominance and their first-ever championship. The Seattle Supersonics drafted Kevin Durant, moved to Oklahoma City and became an NBA powerhouse. The Carmelo Anthony-era Denver Nuggets strung together ten-straight winning seasons—and nine first-round exits in ten visits to the NBA playoffs.

My hometown Chicago Bulls broke-up the Jordan-era dynasty, slowly rebuilt, were shredded along with Derrick Rose's ACL on April 28, 2012 and have struggled to stay healthy ever since.

Good times.

Another injury was perhaps the most fortuitous ever incurred by a domestic sports team. Spurs' center David Robinson broke his foot on December 23, 1996. It was the final blow in what would become a disastrous season, with the Spurs falling from championship contender to lottery hopeful.

As luck would have it, the top prize in that year's draft was Tim Duncan, a prodigiously talented ex-Olympic swimming hopeful from the Virgin islands. With the Spurs at a franchise (and NBA) worst 20-62, Duncan was theirs for the taking. And take they did.

Duncan and Robinson soon formed the core of a team that was as disciplined as it was talented. Spurs players didn't have posses. They didn't deride practice. And they didn't act as if every basket was their first. They only did one thing—win.

Over the next twenty seasons, they averaged 56.6 victories a year. (58.1 if you toss out two strike-shortened seasons.) They played in six NBA Finals, winning five. Posted the league's best record five times. Compiled a .710 winning percentage. Won a minimum of 50 games for eighteen consecutive seasons, and won 60+ six times. And they competed in ten Conference Finals, which meant that every other year they were knocking on the door of the NBA Finals.

No other post-expansion team went so far so often. I dare suggest it is the greatest sustained success in the history of the NBA.

Of course, not all of their decisions were as blindingly obvious as the one to select Tim Duncan. The twosome of Duncan and Robinson needed to be supplemented without the benefit of top ten picks or the fat checkbook required for free-agent signings. And that required some supremely savvy front-office talent.

And the Spurs found it in Larry Brown disciple Gregg Popovich. In his dual role of general manager and coach, Popovich not only selected Duncan but uncovered two foreign players, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, who would play enormous roles in the Spurs' success.

Each was an all-star caliber talent. Durable. And possessed of a temperament that fit seamlessly into the Spurs' team-first culture. Tellingly, it was only after their integration that the Spurs became perennial title contenders.

Popovich eventually relinquished the title of GM to R.C. Buford in 2002. Again, even without a single top twenty draft choice, Burford kept the Spurs machine humming.

To wit, Buford was consistently able to sign ancillary talent like Michael Finley, Robert Horry, Richard Jefferson, Rudy Gay, Brent Barry and future Warriors' coach Steve Kerr. He dipped his toe in the deep end of free-agency with the signing of LaMarcus Aldridge. And made lemonade out of lemons with the acquisition of DeMar DeRozan.

All made (or are making) significant contributions to their respective teams.

But Buford's greatest hit was the theft of Kawhi Leonard from the Indiana Pacers. Leonard's infusion of scoring and defensive prowess re-energized the Spurs and masked the inevitable aging of Duncan and Ginobili, yielding a final championship in 2014.

All these years later, there are some cracks in the foundation. The once-automatic fifty wins aren't quite so automatic. The once-loved Leonard suffered an ugly and prolonged exit from San Antonio—unusual for a franchise so skillful in marrying talent with team. And as of this writing, they're on the verge of a second straight first-round exit.

Gravity may at last be exerting its pull on the San Antonio Spurs. But it won't ever diminish the wonder of their near quarter-century of unbroken success.