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Thirst for victory-San Antomio Spurs
On the eve of the fifth battle of the 2014 championship, Duncan, unlike Duncan, made a rare declaration: “This time we will finish.
Desperate to prove, eager for five crowns, the bitterness of last year’s edge clang side, just waiting for the last moment of sweet revenge.
Hall of Fame guard Isiah Thomas said he understood Duncan’s feelings very well. The Detroit Pistons also led the Lakers 3-2 in the 1988 championship game and were up by one point in the final 14 seconds of Game 6, but lost when center Bill Laimbeer committed a foul on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s signature right baseline hook shot. This allowed Jabbar to get to the free throw line, completing the comeback and putting the game out of reach until the seventh game to complete the Lakers’ domination streak.
“I remember after Game 6, we were in the lounge, it was very quiet, and then Chuck (Coach Daly) came in,” Thomas recalled. Thomas recalls a time when Coach Daly was trying to motivate everyone.
“But what’s there to say? It’s heartbreaking, it’s unforgettable all summer, and you keep thinking, if we had home court advantage, that’s our championship. So you get ready to go into the new season with that, and that’s what Timmy and the Spurs did, they came out and had the best record.
The Pistons took a league-best 63 wins in 1989, then swept the Lakers in the title game to hoist the title. Just as Thomas noted, the Spurs also took the league’s leading game in 2013-14, sitting on home-court advantage.
Duncan’s pre-Game 5 declaration is something Thomas can relate to: “He says it so lightheartedly, but it also shows that every day of the season, that’s all he thinks about. You’re one step away from having the trophy and the champagne in your lounge, and then you push it out.
Shane Battier, the opponent who defended Duncan’s shot that nearly tied the game in the final seconds of Game 7 of the 2013 title game, also said, “You can’t quantify the hunger, the desire, the sense of loss after losing the year before, but that’s real, and the Spurs have that stuff.
When the 2014 playoffs began, Duncan got up quietly in the lounge, walked slowly forward and wrote ’16’ on the board: the number of wins the Spurs needed to win a championship.
The Pistons took a league-best 63 wins in 1989, then swept the Lakers in the title game to hoist the title. Just as Thomas noted, the Spurs also took the league’s leading game in 2013-14, sitting on home-court advantage.
they almost reach the champ but one wining of the game.
So, for the rest of the pre-game lounge, Popovich wouldn’t give his pre-game speech right away, he would wait for his power forward to walk up to the board, cross out the numbers and write in new ones, from 16 to 15 to 14… All the way to the final ‘4’: they had to beat the Heat in four games to take the title.
(Haven’t find a place to check the game record , join us in our casino)
Point five - San Antonio Spurs
After a bitter defeat in 2013, the original team, or rather the old Spurs who are another year older, returned to the championship game more complete and mature with a new system that has been reworked and built since 2010.
They are facing an old rival, the Heat, who are challenging for a three-peat, with the Big Three in their prime and with LeBron James, the number one player in the league today.
For a long time, aggressive defense has been the Heat’s strength, relying on precise rotational defense with a physical advantage to block shooters, make pass path disruptions and sacks, and force turnovers.
They can allow opponents to turn the ball over in up to 17.6% of offensive possessions per game (best in the league), allowing the Heat to convert 19% of their offensive possessions per game from opponent turnovers.
And the Spurs decided to use this to counter the Heat by constantly getting the ball flowing, running a lot, forcing this Heat to keep rotating, making James move more, rotate, assist in defense, and consume more energy. This is the best way to beat the emperor: make him tired.
“No doubt about it!” Popovich said. “If you’re defending a super offensive player like Steph Curry, if you want him to put his heart and soul into the defensive end, you need top singles players to target him, but we don’t have Kevin Durant, LeBron, James Harden, so we’re going to have to build a tower out of sand and rely on every screw to do it. The only way to do that is to get the ball moving and get the defenders to move with it.”
And the Spurs have a deeper and broader roster today, with no Spurs player averaging more than 30 minutes per game in a routine game and eight players playing 20 minutes or more.
The Spurs tied the Heat 1-1 in their first two games, then came to Miami, where the Heat have won 11 straight home games in the playoffs.
The Heat wanted to keep using the same defensive strategy they have been using for the past four years: blitz the point guard, create traps to trap the ball, try to create turnovers and then switch offense and defense. They aggressively pinned Spurs commander Parker in the first two games, forcing him to pass the ball out.
And before Game 3, Popovich changed the lineup, pulling Diaw into the starting lineup in place of traditional long man Splitter. Diaw is a multi-skilled big man with the ability to pass the ball, perhaps his downfall is that he’s too much of a shot blocker, which is the main reason he was released by the Hornets that year.
Released by the back-end of the league’s class, but finding a place on one of the league’s top teams.
However, Popovich knows that Diaw has a high basketball IQ and can bring ball movement for the Spurs. Popovich believes that he can convert the Heat’s defensive advantage into the Spurs’ offensive advantage, as long as he keeps cutting, passing, and covering, and he foresees Diaw being the catalyst for this play.
The Spurs sometimes have five-on-five drills where they can’t dribble the ball, and Diaw loves those practices. When the Heat forced Parker to pass in Game 3 as usual, Diaw, who was pulled into the starting lineup in a hurry, became the de facto point guard. Parker and Diaw have actually been friends since they were in their teens, and they played together in the European Championships only in September. Back in the U.S., when Parker retired in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals due to an ankle injury, it was his old friend Diaw who stepped up and scored 26 points to end the game. In the third game of the championship game, Diaw once again showed his skills as a French magician.
The Spurs delivered a 59.4% shooting percentage in the third game, and hit 90.5% (19 of 21) in the first quarter, and scored 71 points and 75.8% in the first half. The most representative of the Spurs’ style of play was Leonard’s pass to Ginobili in the right corner, followed by a straight pass from the Argentine to Splitter at the top of the circle, and then a second pass to Mills, a bench shooter from the left three-point line, followed by a pass from Mills to Diaw, then a pass from Mills to Diaw after cutting into the baseline and catching Diaw’s cover. Mills cut along the baseline and passed the ball back to Ginobili who cut from the top of the circle and finished with a layup. “Got the ball to the other one, covered around the stall, and then on a nice solid open cut.” said the Spurs assistant coach. “That’s all we did.”
“You have to rely on their defense to attack.” said the Spurs assistant coach. “By moving the ball… Because the pass is faster than the foot.” The Spurs ended up giving up an average of 353 passes per game in the championship game, compared to 256.8 for the Heat, and a total of 51 more assists than the Heat. Ginobili also said, “It’s not that we want to do that, but against them, that’s the only way to score.
Popovich’s approach is to not let the ball stop in your hand for more than half a second, or ‘point five’.
“Pop has his own name for it: Summertime,” said assistant coach Brown. assistant coach Brown said. “It’s when you’re playing, you’re just playing. The ball flows, as the game goes on, you make all kinds of decisions: shooting, passing, cutting, ‘Point five,’ that’s the instruction, you have a half-second, you have a good shot, but he has a better shot, so you pass it over, that’s it, that’s Summertime.
Sharing team Spurs is not a problem, they scored 64.1% of assists last season alone, but good ball flow is not enough to beat the Little Emperor and the Heat, “it has to be perfect. Popovich said. Meaning no hesitation, only unselfishness and no room for mental mistakes because the Spurs’ physical conditions leave no room for mistakes. Making an extra pass is risky, especially against the Heat’s aggressive defense, and a mistake is a lost point on offense and defense. But the Spurs choose to ‘point five’ way of attack, is also a best choice of defense.
“We’re not the most athletic team in the world,” Popovich said. We’re not the most athletic team in the world,” Popovich said. “So if we can keep hitting open shots and make the opponent have to serve from the baseline, that’s going to be very helpful for our defense.”
After the loss in Game 2, Popovich once again emphasized the offensive philosophy to the entire team: “If you don’t pass the ball, you’re going to die. In the third to fifth games, the Spurs averaged 157 more passes per game than the Heat, which also allowed the Spurs to hit 65.1% of their true shots in the last three games. The player who led the league in true shooting percentage that season was Kyle Korver’s 65.3%, which means the Heat had to face a team that converted the entire team to Korver’s shooting percentage.
“I’ve never seen a team so hot. We’ve all been in the league for a long time and we knew it would come back to the mean, they would come back to average numbers… They just didn’t,” We’ve got to play our best,” said Battier, a senior. “We’re going to have to play our best third, fourth and fifth games to get over this.”
Heat veteran James Jones also said, “It was exhausting, we’ve never seen anyone conduct the ball as much and as well as they did.
The Spurs’ 3-point firepower was also on full display, as they ranked 16th in the league in regular-season shots, but came into the playoffs taking almost every opportunity to make a 3-pointer they could. “You can feel their frustration,” Ginobili said. “LeBron had fought hard, but then we scored another three, and I’m sure it was too tough for him and for them, but after 2013, Pop told us that this was the only way to beat them, and if we got into one-and-dones, we wouldn’t have a chance. The Spurs had a 32.6 percent three-point offense in the championship game, averaging 23.6 field goals made, the second highest in league history at the time for a championship game, and a 44.8 percent shooting percentage.
Ginobili said, “The mentality, especially in those three games, was to not give up a single shot, to just keep flowing, keep moving, it was really incredible, it was so much fun to play like that, so exciting, I don’t remember ever playing such great basketball before. Popovich’s constant refrain of “better and better” motivates the Spurs to pursue better and better shots, and unless they get a big opening, they just keep passing the ball around, with players passing between each other to the point of telepathy, and the beautiful open shots result in the Spurs never seeming to miss.
The Spurs completely crushed the Heat in Games 3-5, hitting 54.2% vs. 45.2%, 44.8% vs. 38.2% from three, 65.6% vs. 53% from the box, 71 assists vs. 44 assists, and 113 rebounds vs. 94 rebounds. According to Basketball-Reference, the Spurs’ offensive efficiency in these three games is 124.9, the highest in the past 29 seasons.
But what is most impressive is that in the past three seasons, the Heat have never lost three straight games when James was on the court, regardless of whether it was a regular season game or 293 games in the playoffs. Yet the Spurs have not only won three straight championship games, but also won by an average of 19 points.
“That’s how you play team basketball,” Four-time MVP James said. “Players move, cut, pass, get a shot, take the shot. But it’s all about the team, not the individual.”
There are many classic championship scenes in NBA history, whether it’s Magic Johnson’s Baby Hook over the Green Jackets’ Hall of Fame front line or basketball god Michael Jordan’s game-winning jumper that seemed to freeze time after shaking Bryon Russell, but for the Spurs, there was no need to focus on one player or one screen; what they produced was a classic that integrated the entire team and exploded in the final three games in what may have been the best basketball team performance of all time.
The sweet revenge- San Antonio Spurs
The night after the Game 3 win, Diaw, Splitter and Ginobili went to dinner at Italian restaurant Il Gabbiano, where Popovich took the team a year ago after the Spurs blew a five-point lead in the final 30 seconds of Game 6. “We’ve been here before,” Diaw said. We’ve been here before,” Diaw said. “We’re not embarrassed about it.”
Allen’s corner 3-pointer may have been swirling in their heads for 362 days, and may have flashed back a few times when the Heat were up by 16 at one point in Game 5. But Popovich urged his players to “keep pounding! (pound the rock)*, which for the Spurs meant keep passing the ball, and the Spurs scored 69 of the next 100 points to turn the game around, 104-87.
In the last two minutes of Game 5, the AT&T Center was filled with fans clamoring, but the Spurs coaching staff was quiet. “Everyone sat down.” The assistant coach recalled the moment. “No one said a word, just silence, until the buzzer went off. As players and friends rushed in to celebrate the victory, Popovich saw Avery Johnson, the point guard on the Spurs’ first championship team in 1999, and when Foreigner’s hit song Feels Like the First Time came on, Popovich hugged Johnson and kissed him hard on the cheek. Popovich hugged Johnson and then kissed him hard on the cheek. “All the pain, frustration, anger and everything that happened last year…” Johnson could feel the old coach’s feelings very well. “I could feel him letting it all out.
The Spurs’ Big Three, like the Yankees’ Core Four, had won four crowns in five years, but waited nine years for the fifth. And the Spurs took the fourth crown in 2007, followed by a finger on the void for six years, even if long to keep the 50-win powerhouse, but for the Gold Cup is always a lost cause. The Spurs now have the best teammates and partners to rely on, they are the best team as a whole, the average bench score is the highest in the league 45.1 points, so that the Big Three to hold the surplus to maintain the strength, even if it is the championship series, Popovich still fully use the bench warfare, the total bench score than the Heat to take 79 points.
A long time ago, Spurs basketball and wonderfully beautiful were two different things that rarely appeared in the same sentence. In 1999, the Spurs beat Nick’s first championship with a slow pace and oddly low scoring. Fifteen years later, the Spurs averaged 105.6 points per game and managed to win their fifth championship in team history with a then-championship game record-breaking 52.8% shooting from the field with 55 three-pointers.
They don’t have a major scoring star on their roster like all-time championship teams. “We’re a real team, and everybody contributes,” Parker said. We’re a real team and everybody contributes,” Parker said. “Everyone does their job and we do it together as a team, and that’s the whole key.
The Spurs are the winners of the lowest scoring championship since the Rochester Royals won in 1951 (Parker 17.4) in the lineup.
The Spurs won the championship with their team, with their system, or with the concept and soul of the team. “It’s a team concept that goes way beyond the tactical level,” said Matt Bonner, the Spurs’ backup shooter. It’s a team concept that goes way beyond the tactical level,” said Matt Bonner, the lineup’s backup scorer. “Most of it is intangible.” Of the eight players who played more than 20 minutes for the Spurs that season, only two played for NCAA schools and only one was drafted higher than 15th overall, Duncan. “We’re not the most talented team,” Splitter said. We’re not the most talented team,” Splitter said. “We’re not going to fly over our opponents and do a 360-degree dunk or anything like that, but what we have is our intelligence and our system.
The system may have also been agreed upon, a culture that developed one by one between Popovich and the Big Three, with the uniform crew meeting whenever the Spurs added a newcomer. “We call everyone into the conference room,” Buford said. “And then we check with each other, ‘How can we help this player?
So, that year’s Spurs roster was a United Nations roster, two French, two Australian, plus Argentina, Italy, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean and then New York/Los Angeles/New Hampshire, and the Spurs represented a culture, a basketball mindset, where all five people on the court touched the ball, conducted four times, and then made a shot.
The Spurs used the system to beat the stars, perhaps pointing the way for other teams without a single scoring ace. Of course, the Spurs don’t think of themselves as basketball evangelists trying to spread the word about the right way to play basketball. “Our goal is to try to play well and win games,” Buford said. We’re trying to play well and win,” Buford said. “To say there’s a way to play the ball beautifully, I don’t know how that’s going to be judged.
They played the best basketball I’ve ever seen,” said opponent Chris Bosh.
The headline on the cover of that week’s Sports Illustrated also reads, “Masterpiece”.
