The Spurs Can't Stop, Won't Stop

Prior to their winning the title last season, the recent history of the San Antonio Spurs was one of graceful desperation. For half a decade, they had played the most consistently beautiful basketball in the NBA—clever, total, verging on telepathic—but that beauty was always attended by the likelihood of an unhappy ending. Their nightly patience, those hundred points by a thousand cuts, belied their large-scale hurry. They were old, so old that whole careers had elapsed since they had first been called old, and the chances for a final title, a decade and a half after Tim Duncan's and Gregg Popovich's first, winnowed every year.

Their failures ascended, in stature and in capacity to hurt: losses to Memphis in the first round in 2011, to Oklahoma City in the conference finals in 2012, and to Miami in the Finals in 2013. The later into the postseason that the Spurs played, the less likely a recovery the following year seemed. There was the accumulation of hard games on tired legs, yes, but also there was an ingrained logic, the agreed-upon patterns of human difficulty and progress. Trouble can turn to promise only so many times.

Still, the Spurs continued forward, year after year, and made for a wonderful watch. The ball spun across the court during their offensive possessions like a chip of dry ice on a desk. Old standbys—Tony Parker's below-the-net whirls, Manu Ginobili's ciphered passes, Duncan's post philosophy—gained new context. Kawhi Leonard showed up, quiet and keen, and climbed the San Antonio pecking order in as straightforwardly competent a fashion as he did everything on the court. Danny Green brought a dose of space-affording marksmanship. Patty Mills, Marco Belinelli, Boris Diaw—each addition to the rotation both furthered and solidified the team's identity. It was as if San Antonio were ensuring that if a championship did come to pass, it would mean nothing less than complete vindication of a basketball worldview.

That championship came last June, when the Spurs beat the Heat in five games. It was cathartic and lovely and felt increasingly inexorable as the playoffs wore on, and it was impossible to read as anything but a culmination. The Spurs stood on the podium, after the fifth game, with the flags of their home countries wrapped around their shoulders—Brazil, Argentina, France, Italy—and passed the Larry O'Brien trophy to one another. Popovich circled, patting backs and sharing embraces. Duncan looked like a seven-foot, gray-bearded child.

In the days that followed, speculation centered on whether or not any of the San Antonio principals would retire, taking the opportunity to make a perfect break from the game. Nobody did, and so the Spurs entered this season with just about the same squad that finished the last one. But, though they are now rounding into form after a winter of injuries and uncharacteristic play, they are a different team from last year's. The unlikely goal has been accomplished; stakes have been lowered. How do you watch a team inured to sports' most common outcome, one for which disappointment is no longer a possibility? And what, at this point, is in it for them?

For much of this season, the Spurs offered a clear answer, at least to the first question. Hobbled and underperforming, they seemed to settle, finally, into the role of receding paradigm that they had refused for so long. They played brilliantly in stretches and on certain nights, but their tactics were on display to greater effect in Golden State and Atlanta, where Popovich's former pupils Steve Kerr and Mike Budenholzer helmed younger and fitter teams. Leonard missed significant time with eye and hand injuries, Parker with a balky hamstring. Four straight losses late in February, the second such string of the season, seemed as fitting a signal as any that these Spurs were too hurt, or that their opponents had seen them too many times, or, maybe, that the title had dulled their want just enough. It did not quite feel like the end, but it was perhaps the beginning of it.

Then the Spurs won their next six after that swoon, and they have now won twelve of their last fifteen overall, with one of those three losses coming to the 82-game "30 Rock" gag New York Knicks and serving more as a reminder of the attention required in late-season basketball than a bellwether of regression. San Antonio has spent the past week beating the stuffing out of teams that seemed, at various earlier points in the season, to have surpassed them.

They beat the Hawks by 19, the Thunder by 39 (an excerpt: Diaw throws an entry bounce pass to Duncan; Parker dashes along the baseline past him, gets a handoff, and forces Steven Adams to help; Parker flips the ball back over his shoulder to Duncan for a spacious sixteen-footer; gravity keeps pulling things down; trees keep growing up) the Mavericks by 18, and the Grizzlies by 14.

In certain ways, this rally is reassuring; the Spurs again enter April as one of the handful of teams ready to make a title run and everything in the universe is more or less where it should be. This year, though, that piece of familiarity is harder to parse. The Spurs no longer stand as the lone leaders in offensive liquidity; that designation now belongs to the Warriors, who at their best seem to pass the ball through defenders' bodies. Nor are they the most obviously egalitarian contenders; those are the Hawks, staffed not with post-prime Hall of Famers but with players that will never reach those heights, all of whom are achieving their respective zeniths simultaneously and collectively.

Most keenly felt is the lack of crisis. San Antonio's legacy is airtight. Another title, this summer, would be an addendum; a loss will only mark the end of a victory lap. The best bet—that they will play a little worse than they did last year, and bow out a little earlier—would not be the minor tragedy it had seemed each year before last June.

The Spurs have transcended the game's usual drama. This, more than a disinclination to see them falter, may have produced those calls for sunset-riding in the wake of last season's championship. Now, with their inheritors atop each conference, they seem almost redundant, and stubborn in their refusal to honor their exit cue.

But there remains a pleasure—subtler than in years past, and less dramatic—in watching them once again round into timely form. Part of this is the simple charm of their play. Other teams may match the clarity of their intuition, but they do not possess their precise set of shortcomings—Duncan's disappeared vertical, Parker's spotty three-point shot, a general ground-boundedness—that makes it so consistently necessary. The Warriors can get through a quarter on obscene talent alone. San Antonio plays either cleverly or poorly; their margin for error is gone.

The other part of what makes the Spurs so great to watch, though, has to do with motive. Last year's triumph was an argument for the power of familiarity; it showed that players and coaches can come to know each other well enough, over the years, to outpace their own decay, and that their basketball could be as effective as it was elegant.

This year is a testament to a different kind of worth. It proves that sticking together can yield more than functional rewards, that it has to do as much with joy as it does with legacy-enhancement. This vision of basketball is plainly fun—fun enough, evidently, for the Spurs to run it all back, after all the questions of old men's last chances have been settled, simply because they do not want to stop.