It’s been an exciting time in Spurs land, hasn’t it? Tony cheats! Tim passes David! Spurs are red-hot! What a time for a Spurs site to go down. The most exciting story for non-Spurs fans has obviously been the Tony Imbroglio. Nothing draws traffic like a marriage/sex scandal. For Spurs fans, I think it presents some real troubling issues and questions our loyalty and just what we’re willing to root for. Issues most fans have to deal with almost all the time, but Spurs fans mostly remain insulated from.
In general, I prefer not to traffic in gossip or character defamation. The boys over at 48MoH have a really smart take on it that I mostly agree with. The truth is, as much as we root for these players, as much time as we spend thinking about them, reading about them, and admiring them, we really now nothing about them. We’d love to attribute the qualities we think we see in them on the court to their real life personalities. But we don’t know. And from everything I’ve heard and read about athletes, “cheating” really isn’t all that uncommon, especially in a sport where players spend the better part of 4 months a year away from home. We’re not the moral police, and I’m not going to pass judgement on what players choose to do in their free time, and I’m not going to pretend like there probably aren’t other Spurs doing similar things. Monogamy is a tricky subject, and I won’t pretend like it should be easy for a young, attractive man with loads of money who is going to be propositioned often to easily stay within the confines of a monogamous relationship. Now if the other rumors are true (you know the ones I’m talking about), that’s a different, more complicated subject. Let’s hope we never find out. What most concerns me, at this point, is how Tony plays through this ordeal, and, more interestingly, how his teammates and coaches treat him/respond to him. With a two game sample size, it appears as if the Spurs as a basketball team are doing just fine.
In happier news, Tim Duncan became the all-time NBA Spurs leading scorer Friday night, passing David Robinson (Gervin still has more points with the Spurs if adding the ABA numbers). This is really no surprise, and I’m sure plenty of Spurs records will be held by Duncan by the time his career is finished. Spouting off about Duncan’s greatness is nothing new for a Spurs fan, and perhaps the best thing to happen to us as fans is Duncan, and being allowed to watch his brilliance game after game, year after year. What I find most interesting is that it took exactly one game longer for Duncan to do it than Robinson. Isn’t that crazy? Over a decade plus of playing games, they scored almost the exact same number of points in the exact same number of games. Am I the only one who thinks that the odds of that are pretty incredible?
And finally, how ’bout them Spurs! We’re not 11-1, off to the best start in franchise history, and winners of 10 games in a row. Who would’ve thunk that our ‘fast start’ would actually be a fast start? What’s even more impressive, is we haven’t necessarily looked all that great during this stretch. Both our offense and defense have looked flat and out of sync at times, and we’ve had plenty of trouble with ball security. Plus, we’re winning games without playing the starters big minutes. All of which is to say: we still have plenty of room for improvement. Granted, our opponents haven’t exactly been a murderer’s row; but we’re still getting the Ws, and we’re finally looking like the team that we all remember. What a very pleasant surprise this season is turning out to be.
At the start of the season, I looked at our first 10 games and was hoping for a 7-3 record. I got 9-1. I know we’re already a couple of games in, but examining our next 10 games (which gets us to about the 1/4 mark of the season), as the competition gets a little stiffer (and ignoring the results of the two games that have already been played), I’d hope for 7-3, but be happy with a 6-4 stretch. We have tough games against the Jazz (already won), the Mavs, the Magic, and two against the surprising Hornets (revenge, anyone?).
I’m in Dallas for Thanksgiving (boo! boo!), so I’m not sure when the game recaps will resume. Luckily, my mom (I’d like to take this moment to point out that my family is NOT from Dallas, they just happened to relocate here a few years ago) has a nice cable package that includes Fox Sports SW-San Antonio, so I think I’ll be able to watch the rest of the games this week and hopefully write recaps.
Go Spurs Go.
Come on now. Let’s not add fuel to the fire. Let’s focus on what’s important: the Spurs are on a roll.
And also, I don’t think my loyalty to the Spurs (yeah, including Tony) was not affected by this issue.