San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Wheeling, dealing tips off
For Spurs, one option still is unthinkable
As the rest of the NBA binge-watches the drama and awaits a satisfying resolution, the Spurs say they are exploring all of their options.
One of those options they don’t want to talk about.
Another one nobody does.
We all know trading Kawhi Leonard remains a possibility, and will continue to be unless and until the disgruntled star signs a contract extension. As long as the Spurs lack that signature, their best player is available, whether the franchise publicly acknowledges it or not.
But the Spurs also face a separate, less-discussed dilemma related to all of this, and it’s an issue nobody in the ownership group, in the front office, or in the locker room has had to address before. The last time it came up
was more than 30 years ago, long before most everyone in the organization even was around.
This predicament might be familiar to every other locale in the league, but it brings up a question that in South Texas is more foreign than subways and snowplows.
Should the Spurs even try to win next year?
Bringing this up is uncomfortable, and in these parts it might border on sacrilege. But if R.C. Buford, Gregg Popovich and the Spurs’ owners truly are open to every choice that sits in front of them, then surely they at least have contemplated the idea of a rebuild.
It is not the most attractive option, and it is understandable why the Spurs might believe they can avoid it even if they move on from Leonard. After all, with him missing essentially all of last season, they still missed the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference by only two games.
If they secure even a modest return for Leonard in a trade and add those pieces to their core, shouldn’t they have every reason to expect to be right there behind Golden State and Houston again?
That is one way to look at it, but there are others. For one, the gap between the West’s top two teams and the rest of the league was cavernous, and no team without an elitelevel star figures to narrow that chasm any time soon.
For another, just as many of the players who contributed to last year’s 47-victory team can be reasonably expected to get worse with age (LaMarcus Aldridge, Pau Gasol, Patty Mills) as can be expected to get better (Dejounte Murray, Kyle Anderson, Derrick White).
The immortal Manu Ginobili, as always, can be counted on to be exactly the same.
So starting over might make sense, even though it never happens here by design. The only time the Spurs had a losing record in the last three decades, they went into the season considering themselves contenders, and were forced to admit otherwise only after David Robinson suffered an injury that sidelined him for the bulk of the 1996-97 campaign.
A few months later, the ping-pong balls of the draft lottery ensured they would not have to ponder the idea of starting over until well into the next millennium. In the meantime, franchises as proud as the Lakers, Celtics and Bulls bottomed out, with varying degrees of success, but the Spurs never did.
There are those who believe it would be wise for San Antonio to do so now, and there might be some validity to that logic. Even a modern-day superpower like the Warriors was built primarily through the draft, and the higher you pick, the better your chances of finding the right building blocks.
But there are plenty of defensible reasons to stay the course, too. Popovich, who is 69 and probably will not be around to reap the rewards of a complete teardown, is one. Ginobili, who might not have more than one or two good decades left in him, is another.
Then there is the realization that tanking guarantees nothing but a lot of short-term misery. Philadelphia gets plenty of accolades for committing to “The Process,” and although the Sixers’ future looks bright, their fans sat through five years of atrocious basketball and still have not been rewarded with a trip to the conference finals. The Lakers have not escaped their doldrums yet. Neither have the Bulls nor the Knicks.
It’s also worth remembering where the Spurs were in 2011. That summer, they were coming off their third consecutive season without getting past the second round of the playoffs, and all three of their stars looked well past their prime. Their window should have been closed, and if you would have asked any rational observer back then how the Spurs should go about winning their next title, the obvious answer would have been to rebuild.
They didn’t appear to be two years from another NBA Finals and three years from a championship, but they were. And they kept trying to win, even though they had other options.
Eventually, they will have to consider those alternatives, just like every other franchise does.
But maybe not quite yet.