Even as Duncan stays home, gift keeps giving
SAN ANTONIO — Tim Duncan will not be going to Disney World, and it’s just as well. The theme park already contains a character who’s been through the looking glass and back.
As far as surrealism goes, nothing that happens in Florida this month figures to top Duncan’s last trip to Sacramento, or to Portland, or to Cleveland, where the mega-millionaire Hall of Famer caught the early bus, changed clothes in the training room, and shagged rebounds for the G League call-ups.
Even if time wasn’t moving backward, it sure felt like it was.
The scenes of Duncan the assistant never became any less jarring than watching chess pieces come to life, and this had to be true even for him a few times, too. In his only interview of the season, he said he volunteered to join the Spurs’ coaching staff “for the fun of it,” but there surely was a moment — perhaps in the middle of an eight-game losing streak in November — when playing video games with the kids seemed like a better source of amusement.
The truth is Duncan donned his sports coat as a favor, one for which Gregg Popovich always will be grateful, and the Spurs might be, too. After losing two assistants last summer, Popovich needed somebody he could trust, and for a gig with no guarantees beyond one year, on a team that didn’t exactly have championship aspirations, coveted candidates were not exactly beating down his door.
So Duncan volunteered, surprising even Popovich, and everyone understood the deal. The best power forward in the history of basketball was not about to pursue a career in coaching, and he was not interested in committing to anything beyond the following 10 months or so.
He wasn’t going to take over for Popovich when he retired, and he certainly wasn’t going to go off and take a job rebuilding the Hawks or Timberwolves.
Had the coronavirus pandemic not happened, Duncan’s coaching career probably would be over by now, and so it’s no wonder he did not insist on packing all of his camouflage cargo shorts into a bag, kissing his kids goodbye, and camping out in the Disney “bubble” for a month.
A Spurs official did not specify who made the final decision to have Duncan remain in San Antonio and work with the rehabilitating LaMarcus Aldridge, but it almost certainly was an easy one for everybody.
Duncan, after all, has been the coach paired with Aldridge during individual workouts all season. And even though it was Duncan who took over for a night when Popovich missed a game in Charlotte in March, fellow assistants Becky Hammon and Will Hardy are the ones destined to become head coaches someday, either with the Spurs or elsewhere.
The four-month NBA stoppage might have put a wrench in any succession plans, if the Spurs had any. Before the coronavirus, Popovich would have had the opportunity to finish out this season, then fulfill his lifelong dream of coaching Team USA at the Olympics before walking away for good. Now, with the
Tokyo Games pushed back to 2021, Popovich might decide to fill the time between now and then by coaching another NBA season.
That’s just speculation, though, and what it means for Duncan is uncertain, too. But there is at least a real possibility that we have seen him on an NBA sideline for the last time, even if the Spurs never will keep him out of the practice facility.
But if he doesn’t come back next year, and if his lone season in coaching turns out to be the one in which his franchise misses the postseason for the first time in 23 years, that won’t mean his occasionally absurd venture into a new field was for naught.
Chances are, 10 years from now either Derrick White or Dejounte Murray or Lonnie Walker IV or Luka Samanic will still find use for something they picked up from Duncan. And even if Patty Mills and Marco Belinelli remain the Spurs’ only in-uniform links to their championship days, Duncan’s presence provided another.
More meaningful than any of that, though, is the gift Duncan gave Popovich, the coach who once swore he’d walk away the same day his best player did, then stuck around long enough to realize how much he missed him.
Duncan didn’t have to get on that early bus, or dress in that training room, or shag those rebounds in cities all over America. There was no real reward in it for him.
But for Popovich? Duncan was willing to go through the looking glass. And even from Disney World, his old coach is grateful for it.