Search Results for: duncan
San Antonio 100, Miami 103 (OT) Series tied 3-3 Two missed free throws. Two 50/50 rebounds lost. 2 second opportunity 3-pointers. Those are the enduring images of the devastating Game 6 loss for Spurs fans. If any one of those plays bounces just slightly differently, the Spurs have their 5th ring tonight. In a game of moments and inches, the Spurs lost just one too many in the final 30…
Miami 104, San Antonio 114 San Antonio leads series 3-2 Coach Pop’s response to Miami inserting Mike Miller into the starting line-up and going small (and, by extension, playing faster) was to double down and go even smaller and even faster. You want to play small? Well, paraphrasing Danny Green, our smaller is smaller than your smallest. The story of the game will be Manu Ginobili’s throwback game. And it…
Miami 109, San Antonio 93 Series tied 2-2 When that Dwyane Wade plays, nobody is beating this Miami Heat team. Period. End of discussion. End of series. Isn’t this the whole reason these 3 combined forces in the first place three years ago? With this Wade, LeBron only has to be really really good, not awesome. And Bosh can have a secretly devastating game on both ends of the floor,…
Miami 77, San Antonio 113 San Antonio leads series 2-1 Game 3 will be rightfully remembered as the Gary Neal Game, or the Danny Green Name, or some hybrid thereof. It will also be known for the barrage of 3-pointers those two players hit, en route to setting an NBA Finals record for most 3-pointers by a team, 16. And it should be remembered that way. It was an awesome…
San Antonio 84, Miami 103 Series tied 1-1 I could kind of see this loss coming, and I’m mostly OK with it. a simple adage in sports is that “whatever team needs the win more will often get it”. Particularly when the teams are pretty even and playing for the ultimate prize, you can see how this would apply. The Heat could ill-afford to lose this game; it would essentially…
San Antonio 92, Miami 88 San Antonio leads series 1-0 Holy Hell, that was a good game. And not just because the Spurs won, though that surely helps my retroactive opinion of it. Both teams just played at a tremendously high level, with amazing efficiency on both ends. There were plenty of missed shots, but there weren’t a lot of bad ones. The defense was good; the offense was often…
I’m a sentimentalist. A sap, if you will. My favorite part of every playoff series is the moments after the final game, when the two teams shake hands, share hugs, encouragement, laughter, and whatever else it is that competitors do. I just love these moments. To me, this is sportsmanship and competitive nature at its purest and most platonically perfect. The Spurs have always been especially “good” at these post-series…
It took a long time, but we finally have an opponent for the Spurs in the NBA Finals. It’s only fitting that the Finals is Miami vs. San Antonio, too, as, save for a Tony Parker injury near the end of the season, these were the two best teams in the league. They are also probably the two most well-balanced teams in the league, both sporting elite offenses and defenses….
(Authors note: I chose this title before reading Stephen’s excellent post from earlier in the week.) In the interest of full disclosure, I never thought this team would get back to the Finals. After 2007, each following year saw us move a bit further away from elite. In 2008 we ran out of gas against LA in the Conference Finals (I still think if not for that plane mishap in…
San Antonio 93, Memphis 86 Spurs win series 4-0 The Spurs are remarkably back in the NBA Finals after a 6 year drought. And they got there on the back of perhaps this team’s greatest masterpiece, a work of art that has firm roots in the bitter defeat from this same Memphis team two years ago. This was a masterpiece of coaching. Pop probably started devising his defensive schemes about…
