Posts Tagged ‘Spurs’

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The Physicality of Kendrick Perkins

May 26, 2012  ·  9:44AM





HANG TIME WEST – There is nothing hidden about Kendrick Perkins. He was a first-round draft pick. He won a championship with the Celtics. His 2011 acquisition was widely viewed as one of the final moves to the Thunder becoming title contenders.

But Perkins plays on the same team with a pair of stars who dominate the spotlight, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, and James Harden is on a path to a similar level. Perkins isn’t even the most acclaimed of the Oklahoma City big men – power forward Serge Ibaka led the league in blocks despite playing  just 27.2 minutes a game and finished second to Tyson Chandler of the Knicks for Defensive Player of the Year. There is a certain anonymity to the Thunder’s starting center.

Not to Mike Brown, though. The Lakers coach exited the playoffs with nothing short of raves after Perkins and the Thunder finished off Los Angeles on Monday to advance to the Western Conference against the Spurs, opening Sunday in San Antonio.

“One of the things, in my opinion, that kind of goes unnoticed is they get a toughness, a physicalityness, from having Kendrick Perkins,” Brown said. “You do look at a Westbrook and you do look at Durant and Ibaka’s ability to block shots and Harden coming off the bench. But to me, this is a completely different team if you take Perk out of the equation.

“He’s almost like the heart and soul, and he does a great job of bringing it for as long as he’s on the floor, especially down the stretch. They feed off of that. That’s what makes them, in my opinion, a playoff team.”

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Griffin Grumbling Is Too Soon, Off Base

May 21, 2012  ·  9:02AM





HANG TIME PLAYOFF HEADQUARTERS – Before we let the Clippers slip away into the shadows of teams vanquished on the road to the Larry O’Brien trophy, we have to slather a little praise on the “other” team in Los Angeles for a season full of entertaining basketball, complete with enough Chris Paul and Blake Griffin highlights to last a couple of seasons.

We’d also like to back the critics off of Griffin and his game, which is a whopping 159 games old with this playoff run included. That’s right, Griffin is just two seasons of actual on-court time into his career that has been scrutinized incessantly since he burst onto the scene as dunking machine/pitchman last season.

I saw the Inside crew discussing Griffin’s game (Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, Shaq and Ernie Johnson go at it above) and felt the instant analysis of his long-term prospects was a bit premature. Shaq and Ernie have it right that it’s far too soon to assume we’ve seen the very best Griffin will have to offer during his career.

(Andrew Bynum‘s been in the league for seven years and people are still talking about him being a young player … and this is supposed to be it for Griffin?)

This was Griffin’s first playoff rodeo folks. Why would anyone assume he’s reached his zenith, that he won’t continue to improve in the coming seasons?

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Staples Center and the Perfect Storm

May 17, 2012  ·  4:42PM





HANG TIME WEST – The Lakers are playing home games. The Clippers are playing home games. The NHL’s Kings are playing home games. The Amgen Tour of California, a major cycling event, will pass through.

All in and around Staples Center.

All between Thursday night and Sunday night.

“The perfect storm,” said Lee Zeidman, the senior vice president and general manager of the building.

He is right on both counts. Perfect for the arena workers and surrounding businesses because all three primary tenants remain alive in the playoffs, which helps recoup some of the money lost by the lockout along with being a source of pride for the sports community. But, what a storm of activity, the way fate converged as both NBA teams opened the second round on the road and came home the same time while the NHL club dominated its postseason beyond what even the most optimistic of fans could have dreamed. It’s that timing, not just the fact that this is the first time all three made the postseason the same year, that put the calendar into the blender.

“This will never be duplicated by any arena at any time,” Zeidman said. “In the country.”

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Spurs cruise away from bruising

April 29, 2012  ·  3:58PM





SAN ANTONIO – The Jazz plan was the bang away at the Spurs, beat them, bruise them, chop away and eventually bring them down the way a lumberjack does to a tree.

But you can’t hit what you can’t catch and so the Spurs ran and dashed and sprinted to a 106-91 win in Game 1 on Sunday. It’s just the latest step in the remarkable transformation of the Spurs from the NBA’s premier defensive team to the club that ranked second in the league in scoring this season.

“It began 2 ½ years ago out of necessity when we realized we couldn’t defend like that anymore and I realized that we were going to have to score more in order to win,” said San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich.

All in all, the Spurs did a pretty solid job of combating what was supposed to be Utah’s big advantage on the backboards, managing to stay within 45-39 in rebounding.

But almost every time that Utah managed to hammer and maul and work away on the inside to chip the lead down to what appeared to be striking distance, the Spurs responded literally with a run. It was either Tony Parker running down the middle of the lane for another layup or Manu Ginobili running through traffic for a dunk or even 36-year-old Tim Duncan sprinting down the floor as a trailer on the fastbreak.

You can’t hit what you can’t catch.

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Spurs Write Their Perfect Finish

April 27, 2012  ·  1:46AM





HANG TIME WEST – After all the concern about the closing schedule with games in rapid-fire succession, all the displeasure at a back-to-back-to-back in California last week only to turn around for another back-to-back in Oakland on Thursday night to close the regular season, the ending could not have gone much better for the Spurs.

The last few weeks went from nightmare possibilities about laboring into the postseason to, in actuality, their dream outcome: a 10-game winning streak without coming close to taxing the veterans. Along the way the Spurs secured the best record in the conference and home-court advantage through the West bracket, all the while making rest the priority, with no concerns at the very end over the impact of the travel schedule.

Did we mention coach Gregg Popovich got to limit the minutes of his veterans?

That was No. 1 on the game-plan list, not edging the Thunder for the top spot in the West. Finishing first was just a prize that went along with it.

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Who Is Your Coach Of The Year?

April 26, 2012  ·  11:44AM





HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – Don’t take our word for it — one of the greatest coaches of all time thinks Spurs coach Gregg Popovich ranks among the best of the best.

Larry Brown (above) speaks glowingly about the job Popovich has done throughout his career. And much like NBA.com’s Steve Aschburner, we think this season has been one of Pop’s best ever (not that he cares what we or anyone else in the media thinks). Good enough to edge reigning Coach of The Year Tom Thibodeau for the honor this season.

There were a number of strong candidates in addition to Popovich and Thibodeau. Frank Vogel guided the Pacers to a top three seed in the Eastern Conference. Doc Rivers revived the Celtics from an early season funk and finished with the Atlantic Division title. Scott Brooks has led Oklahoma City to the top of the Western Conference heap, a hair behind Pop’s Spurs. And you know we couldn’t forget our guy Lionel Hollins and the job he did with the Hang Time Grizzlies this season.

And those are just the guys who made the final cut.

If you had to choose, who gets the hardware?:


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Time To Rethink The West Race?

April 23, 2012  ·  9:37AM





HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – Had someone asked you a month ago to rank the true contenders in the Western Conference, your list would probably have included the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs and Los Angeles Lakers — most likely in that order.

But after the whirlwind drama of the past 72 hours (and really the past month), no one can be blamed for taking a moment to rethink that order. In fact, there might need to be a team or two (the Clippers and Grizzlies perhaps …?) added to that list of contenders. It’s come to this, a complete crisis of confidence in our own picks based on the play of all of these teams.

As skeptical as we were of the Spurs early on and whether or not they could maintain their collective health to mount yet another championship run, we have since reconsidered. Their in-season acquisitions, at the trade deadline and elsewhere, changed the game in their favor. They’ve dismantled all comers, when Gregg Popovich feels like unleashing his full arsenal on someone the way he did the Lakers Friday night.

The same goes for the Lakers, who seriously upgraded their operation with addition of Ramon Sessions and apparently Jordan Hill, who played huge minutes in place of Andrew Bynum in the Lakers’ double overtime win over the Thunder yesterday in Los Angeles.

Ron Artest‘s vicious elbow aside, this matchup offered us a telling look inside the psyches of both teams. The Lakers, even when they are shooting like first graders on a 10-foot rim, still have the firepower (and the Kobe Bryant power) to overcome their own failings to steal a game from another elite team. The Thunder, on the other hand, showed us that they still have some maturing to do.

Thunder beat writer Darnell Mayberry of the Oklahoman warned us about this on the Hang Time Podcast earlier this month. He told us that we might be crowning the Thunder prematurely after they dispatched the Heat and Bulls on successive Sundays. He reiterated his warning after the Thunder blew a 17-point fourth-quarter lead and lost their way (and the game) against the Lakers:

“We got cold when we needed to stay hot,” said Thunder coach Scott Brooks.

Sound familiar?

Once again, a severe offensive drought doomed the Thunder. This time, it was a 9-for-36 shooting performance in the fourth quarter and overtime. This time, the Lakers outscored the Thunder 53-29 in the final 22 minutes.

And this time, it all but sealed the Thunder’s fate as the 2-seed in the Western Conference.

“We were taking jump shots,” Brooks said.

And tons of them…obviously with very few of them falling.

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Spurs Rest Stars (And Keep Winning)

April 19, 2012  ·  1:42AM





SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The Spurs became the only team in the league to sweep a pair of back-to-back-to-backs this season by completing the California swing with a 127-102 win over the Kings. The more-meaningful achievement? Three cruise victories that allowed coach Gregg Popovich to still find rest for his main players despite the taxing schedule.

Even for a team that puts the entire emphasis on the postseason, to where Popovich remains unwavering in his plan to conserve minutes even if it means losing the No. 1 spot in the Western Conference to Oklahoma City, the trip was a major success. There were the three wins, of course, but they stuck to the ideal script of stepping on lottery-bound Golden State on Monday and Sacramento on Wednesday and looked impressive in beating the Kobe Bryant-less Lakers in between.

“It’s better than the alternative,” Popovich said. “Everybody wants to be in a rhythm now. It’s too late in the season to go into a slump and lose out of five or something like that. To be winning down the stretch, nobody would trade that.”

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Resting Stars: Spurs Play Their Game

April 17, 2012  ·  8:46AM





HANG TIME MIDWEST BUREAU – With his Spurs facing three games in three nights on a West Coast road trip this week — at Golden State, at the L.A. Lakers, at Sacramento — San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich has an opportunity to get creative again with his roster deployment. However he decides to play it — or whoever he decides not to play —  is evidently perfectly acceptable to the league.

NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver said Friday that the Spurs would face no fines, suspensions or other reprisals for Popovich’s decision last week to withhold the services of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker from San Antonio’s game at Utah.

“I think this is a unique season,” Silver said. “And the fans understand that competitive strategy is part of what goes into coaching this year. It’s unique and teams like the San Antonio Spurs are playing to win a championship, and I think fans understand that.”

Popovich said he picked that game “pretty much when the schedule came out” and didn’t even have them travel with the club to Salt Lake City. The league was fine with that, Silver said.

“The strategic resting of particular players on particular nights is within the discretion of the teams. And Gregg Popovich in particular is probably the last coach that I would second-guess.”

For the record, the Spurs have held Duncan, Ginobili and Parker out of the same game seven times in their 10 seasons together; their record is 0-7, with a losing margin of 15 points. Last week’s loss at Utah was closer — the Jazz trailed by as many as eight points in the fourth quarter — but Popovich also did it at Portland Feb. 21 and his team got trounced 137-97.

The collective shrug at NBA HQ seems a little surprising, considering the response the Lakers got a couple decades ago when Pat Riley sat out Magic Johnson, James Worthy and Mychal Thompson for the final game of the 1989-90 season. L.A. got destroyed by 42 points that night at Portland and the league fined the Lakers $25,000. Even their owner, Jerry Buss, was quoted at the time: “Our fans would have been disappointed if the same thing happened here.”

Utah forward Paul Millsap felt insulted, calling the move “a slap in the face” and citing it as “a little motivation that … got us through.”

Popovich said he was just doing right by the Spurs, in reaction to the frantic post-lockout schedule. “However you want to look at it, 13 games in 18 days, or 16 games in 23 days or ending the season four in five nights, it’s just crazy,” he said that night. “So I’ve got to do something about it.”

But that?

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Champs Must Become Road Warriors

April 16, 2012  ·  11:56AM





HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – If a championship run does nothing, it forges a certain bond among the men that remain to defend it and hardens their resolve at doing it by any means necessary.

That would also help explain why the Dallas Mavericks seem undaunted by the prospect of having to hit the road in this postseason to try to defend that title.

From Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Terry on down, the Mavericks have a clear vision of what it will take to battle their way through these playoffs. And they know it’s just as difficult either way, but especially in this particular season, given the nature of the lockout and all that it has wrought.

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