The names change but the results don't. It used to be David Robinson, Sean Elliott, Avery Johnson and Steve Kerr. Now, it's Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, Bruce Bowen and Robert Horry. The only constants are Tim Duncan in the hole, Gregg Popovich on the bench — and winning. The San Antonio Spurs are now the team that makes black-and-silver look like championship colors. "Commitment to excellence," Horry said before Game 1, knowing the Raiders may have coined the phrase but the Spurs have lived it the last eight years.
The Utah Jazz entered the NBA Western Conference finals Sunday with a versatile, athletic, hard-nosed collection of basketball characters, led by their brass knuckles coach, Jerry Sloan. And they found that beating the rag-tag Golden State Warriors in the second round is nice, but the Spurs are an entirely different beast — bigger, stronger, more experienced, more resourceful, more disciplined, better coached.
Less than 48 hours after surviving an emotional battle with the Phoenix Suns, the Spurs jacked themselves up and put forth one sublime playoff effort to beat Utah. When the Spurs get 27 points and 10 rebounds from Duncan, 21 points and six assists from Parker, and 23 points and 10 assists from Ginobili, forget beating them. When they get 80 minutes from the reserves out of fear the starters would be tired, and play defense like those other guys who wear silver and black, they look like the presumptive champs. Okay, maybe Jordan's Bulls, or Magic's Lakers or one of the truly great Celtics teams could trump that, but it would take a team with its own championship bling.
One more championship, a fourth, and the Spurs would become NBA royalty, if they're not already. They've got three, and it so easily could be five since 1999. A questionable foul call against Ginobili in Game 7 here last year against Dallas, and a Derek Fisher prayer-of-a-shot with 0.4 of a second to play in 2004 for the Lakers might very well have cost the Spurs two championships.
The rest of this season is about one question: Can anybody beat the Spurs, healthy and as desperate to win as if they were ringless?
Okay, the Suns might have been able to, but the NBA handcuffed them for one critical game and the Spurs jumped all over that advantage to push past Phoenix. Next up is Utah, which has more size than the Suns, but none of its postseason experience (save for Fisher, now Utah's heart, soul and inspiration). But here's the bad news for the Jazz after one game: Deron Williams, already the league's third-best playmaker behind Steve Nash and Jason Kidd, hit 13 of 23 shots, scored a game-high 34 points, grabbed 7 rebounds, dished 9 assists and turned the ball over only once; Carlos Boozer had 20 points and 12 rebounds — yet Utah trailed by double digits for probably 40 minutes.
Ginobili picked up where he left off against the Suns, raining threes and twirling his way to the basket whenever the mood suited him. The moment Utah committed to closing down the lane on Ginobili, he found Parker or Michael Finley or Bowen for open jumpers. And when the Jazz tried to close out on the shooters defensively, they dumped it into Duncan for bank shots or hooks or back-downs — whatever he wanted, really.
Nobody's saying the series is over, not after one game. But this is going to look like a second-round series, not the conference finals, unless the Jazz can make one huge adjustment by Tuesday night's Game 2. Luckily for the Jazz players, they've got a coach who just might be able to pull it out of them. Sloan was far less concerned with strategy than effort afterward. "I told them," he said, "we've got to learn to compete. I mean, we were shaking our heads at each other. If one guy made a mistake, it was somebody else's fault. That's part of what a young team has to learn. We have to stay together, we have to fight together . . . I didn't think we did that. We were looking for excuses.
"If you are going to be intimidated, don't show up. That's what I told our players . . . if you are intimidated and you don't want to go out there and compete, then stay in the locker room. I don't like what I saw, with the guys shaking their heads at each other."
Fisher has seen the Spurs up close and personal for 11 years, starting with his three championship seasons with the Lakers, then for two more with the Warriors, and now with the Jazz. He's beaten the Spurs, lost to them, mostly battled them, whether it was Johnson, Kerr, Ginobili or Parker. "Over the years," Fisher said, "my respect for this team, its coach and players has just grown and grown and grown."
Asked if they've changed over the years, Fisher said, "No . . . this is what they do. Great teams, great organizations — that's the thing they understand — the name on the front of the jersey is more important than the name on the back of the jersey. I have a respect for [Popovich] that's immeasurable. And you know that Pop's philosophy is, 'If you come to play for me, here's what we do.' "
First and foremost, before Duncan starts posting or Ginobili starts twirling, the Spurs D you up. Fisher, after missing six of seven shots, said he didn't remember getting an open shot, "just trying to see over Duncan with the shot clock at three," he said. That's why Boozer missed 10 of 17 shots, why Mehmet Okur missed 12 of 15, why the Jazz shot only 29 percent in the first half and fell hopelessly behind.
In case you're wondering about Horry, he had no shots, no points and three rebounds in 17 minutes and a 30-second ovation when he checked into the game as a reserve. Horry would be arrested on sight if he landed in Phoenix, but here he was serenaded until vocal cords were tired and hands were raw from clapping. The people who love the Spurs in spring probably realized that Horry's body check on Nash and the Suns' suspensions that followed might have eliminated the biggest threat of this postseason.
Seven games sounds like a long time, but Sloan's sense of urgency and publicly challenging his team suggests that if Utah is going to do something it needs to be Tuesday, before the Spurs get a hold of another opponent and squeeze the playoff life out of them.
