Delving deep into their playbook in the final minute of a close game, the San Antonio Spurs put Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili to work against the Cleveland Cavaliers’ infant defense.
Ginobili had a rookie, Joe Harris, on his hip when he went into a classic, basic “UCLA cut” down into the low post, spun around and flashed open as Duncan delivered the ball.
Spurs vs. Cavaliers
Tim Duncan and Boris Diaw score 19 points apiece and San Antonio beat Cleveland for the 10th straight time.
Fair? This was a kid from Hooterville getting off the bus in Times Square and immediately being snagged in game of three-card monte. Ginobili sank the layup to make it 91-88 with 17.7 seconds left and, well, welcome to the NBA, Joe Harris.
Harris was playing in his eighth NBA game. Duncan, Ginobili and Tony Parker were playing in their 686th in the regular season as a trio. They’ve won 504 games of them and another 177 in the playoffs. With Duncan, under coach Gregg Popovich, the Spurs have been going to the playoffs every year since Harris was in first grade.
They’ve won NBA championships running cuts like that, so there was no shame in the hard lesson San Antonio gave him Wednesday night in its effective, if generally artless, 92-90 victory at Quicken Loans Arena.
“I knew — I mean, I’m not a dummy,” said Harris, the No. 33 pick from Virginia whose perimeter shooting and hustle have earned him minutes — and the opportunity to get singed. “I figured they were probably going to be coming at me. We talked about it too. It’s one of the plays we had prepared against.
“They almost lulled me to sleep. I was getting on top of him hard on all of his cuts. He just kept me on his back side and it was quick high-low action. I should have done a better job with my vision. Shouldn’t have turned my head to the ball. Tried to get at least between him and the basket, instead of playing on the top side.”
That laundry list of things to clean up individually? The Cavaliers have that too. They’re a rookie team, more Andrew Wiggins than Joe Harris in sheer talent level and lofty expectations, but still far left on their learning curve. They’re 5-5, feeling some urgency to win games now mostly to muzzle a ready-to-pounce media, yet generally accepting of the fact that every turned head and stubbed toe today will lead to a tighter, brighter tomorrow.
“That’s the only way you can grow, by being able to accept some of the things that you didn’t do so well,” LeBron James said.
James was front and center on that. After missing 11 of 17 shots and scoring only four points after halftime, the Cavaliers’ star didn’t even get a chance to misfire at the end. When Ginobili’s missed free throw came off the rim with 7.8 seconds left, Anderson Varejao got the ball to James, who got swarmed by Duncan and Ginobili. He lost the ball behind his back for his fifth turnover, and walked off the court pointing to himself — his bad — at the horn.
Even the King can’t be a finished product if all around him, brought together to serve his ambitions, remains a work in progress. Popovich and Ginobili both talked afterward about how much better Cleveland will be by March when the teams meet again. None of it came with a guarantee.
“You’ve got to go continue to play, continue to watch film, continue to go over situations,” James said. “Be in situations. And you learn from it.”
After the game they squandered at home Monday — four guys scored 20 points or more and they still lost to Denver — the Cavaliers found positives in this one. Ninety-two points was the fewest Cleveland has given up this season. The Spurs made just five of 16 3-pointers. Varejao was irrepressible with 23 points and 11 rebounds. Guard Kyrie Irving, after a shaky start, finished solid with 20 points.
Of course, Boris Diaw (19 points, seven assists) picked apart the Cavs’ defense at times. Popovich’s gang tactics still manage to vex James. And if you look at the final two minutes of each quarter, the Spurs outscored them 28-14 to constantly wrench the momentum back in their direction.
This is all familiar stuff for San Antonio, who are at the opposite end of their life cycle. They face the challenges of any mature organization, where way right on the curve can lead to sloppiness and settling. Even if their home safes and cluttered trophy rooms give them amble cushion to get things right by their next postseason appearance, the Spurs have to work as hard at their tasks as the Cavaliers do at theirs.
“I think sometimes maintaining something is a little more difficult than getting there in the first place,” Popovich said before the game. “Because you have to fight those natural human tendencies to think you’ve arrived and, ‘because you’ve arrived, you’re always going to be in that position.’ It’s like you need to start over again every year.”
This was some deep, competitive and even psychological stuff the man of few words (quarter breaks, anyway) was laying on reporters. It comes with the territory, though, for the one team among 30 that is at the doctoral level. The Spurs’ sustained level of excellence — five championships in 15 years, essentially with the same core — is something unseen in the NBA since “the Bill Russell era,” Cavs coach David Blatt noted.
Cleveland, in its James-Kyrie Irving-Kevin Love Big Three 2.0 development, is trying to build a championship contender. Its upside? Maybe the four-Finals, two-titles run of James’ Miami Heat sojourn. Meanwhile San Antonio long ago built and now re-tools and maintains a dynasty, the likes of which we might not see again.
The gap is that big.
People think of us as a constant because of the success over a long period of time,”
Popovich said. “But we’ve had to make
changes all the way along the way too.
With our O’s and X’s, with our strategies,
how we want to play defense,
what we want to do on offense. We’ve changed the team a lot.
– Gregg Popovich
“Obviously Timmy and Tony and Manu have been here a long time. But we’ve had to make a lot of changes to pieces, and [general manager R.C. Buford] and his group have done a lot of scouting trying to find the guys that we want in those spots. So we’ve had to adjust along the way, too. But since we’ve been successful, I guess people think it’s been a constant and a given. But it’s not.”
Last season, Popovich made sure the Spurs felt the full brunt of their coughed-up 2013 Finals failure, the Ray Allen shot in Miami in Game 6 and the heartbreak that followed. It drove them to get it right this June. So what did Popovich put in front of them this time, given that happy conclusion? He started them off watching video of their struggles against Dallas and Oklahoma City in the West bracket.
“What we have to improve. Where we have to do better,” he said, gratification forever deferred. “It’s a simple game. If you skip steps — if you skip post defense or transition D or hitting the open man or taking contested shots — the basketball gods, they get you for that.”
Speaking of gods, no one should “god up” the Spurs and what they’ve accomplished. Good fortune, serendipity and happy circumstances have worked in their favor, Popovich acknowledged. Their star players have given owner Peter Holt “hometown discounts” on contracts to stay together, never seriously casting wandering eyes to bigger or more glamorous markets. None of them has suffered injuries on par with Derrick Rose, Kobe Bryant, Russell Westbrook, John Wall, Paul George, Love or a dozen other NBA stars.
“In our case, I’ve said many, many times that I think our biggest pat on the back should be that we didn’t screw it up,” Popovich said. “But we certainly didn’t create it. Because anyone in the league would like to follow David [Robinson, Hall of Fame center] with Tim, and then start building your program. So our job is to not screw that up, and I don’t think we did.”
James, Blatt and the Cavs have asked for that same challenge in its present and future forms, with no assurances they’ll succeed. Popovich and his crew have earned the luxury of tackling and considering it (never savoring) in the past tense.
And then he sends Duncan and Ginobili out there again in the final seconds Wednesday, scalpels sharpened, muscle memory and instincts kicking in, with the Spurs’ execution leading to (gulp) the Cavaliers’.
