Posts Tagged ‘Stephen Jackson’

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Spurs Breathe Easy As MRI Clears Duncan

February 3, 2013  ·  6:35PM


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HANG TIME, Texas — The citizens of San Antonio can go back to remembering the Alamo as the most tragic civic loss ever.

Tim Duncan will remain a part of the Spurs drive for a fifth NBA championship after an MRI showed no structural damage to his left knee. He has a sore knee, a mild right ankle sprain and is listed as day-to-day for his return to the lineup.

The 36-year-old Duncan had to be carried off the court by teammates DeJuan Blair and Stephen Jackson with 3:54 left in the second quarter Saturday night after Washington’s Martell Webster rolled into the back of legs following a missed shot.

Though TV cameras showed Duncan moving under his own power in the hallway of the AT&T Center and many of his teammates said they were encouraged to see Duncan walk out of the locker room without crutches following the game, there was going to be lingering doubt until a full exam was performed on Sunday.

It’s just the latest example of how everything can change in the blink of an eye. The Spurs have been cruising along comfortably all season with Duncan having one of the best showings in years. San Antonio currently has the best record in the NBA at 38-11, two games ahead of Oklahoma City and 5 1/2 better than defending champion Miami.

With Duncan in the middle, the Spurs are again legitimate contenders for the title. His loss would have realistically ended those dreams.

Duncan was making his return after sitting for four games with a sore left knee. Duncan said he suffered that injury after landing wrong at Philadelphia on Jan. 21.

Recently selected to his 14th All-Star Game, Duncan is averaging 17.3 points, 9.7 rebounds and 2.7 blocks with a 24.9 Player Efficiency Rating in his 16th NBA season.

The Spurs will be without Duncan as they start on their annual rodeo trip, a nine-game trek with the All-Star break in the middle that opens on Wednesday night in Minneapolis. Now that trip will be ever tougher without Duncan, at least in part.

But for a city that had been holding its collective breath, a huge sigh of relief. The championship chase is still on.

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Duncan Injury Packs Worry For Spurs

February 3, 2013  ·  1:08AM

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SAN ANTONIO — As if they didn’t have enough to lug around on a nine-game trip that will keep them away from home for most of the month, now the Spurs have to pack concern about Tim Duncan’s health.

There was a collective gasp at the AT&T Center when Duncan went down with just over four minutes left in the second quarter and had to be carried off the floor by DeJuan Blair and Stephen Jackson. Then there was sigh of relief when teammates later saw him walk out of the locker room under his own power without crutches.

“He’s fine. He’s fine,” said Tony Parker. “It’s nothing big. I’m sure [coach Greg Popovich] is going to be very cautious about his knee and we’ll see. He was pretty positive.”

The early diagnosis was a sprained right ankle and sprained left knee. But, one week after Rajon Rondo walked away from what was first thought to be a minor injury and then found out that he’d torn his ACL and was lost for the season, the Spurs will not rest easy until Duncan undergoes an MRI.

“That was scary when you see that,” said Wizards coach Randy Wittman. “Those are always the ones you don’t want to see when a guy falls into you while your feet are planted on the ground. I just talked to his doctors and they said he is going to be fine. That was not a pretty thing to see.”

It was clear that Duncan’s injury affected the rest of the lineup. After building a 27-point lead in the first half, the Spurs lost focus and let the Wizards get as close as six points early in the fourth quarter.

“That’s going on through everybody’s mind …What’s happening?” Jackson said. “To have our best player go down like that, holding his knee and his ankle it’s frustrating.

“Nobody really seen him at halftime, because he was in [the training room] trying to figure out what’s wrong. I don’t really know the in’s and out’s of what happened, but I seen him walk out of here, so that’s always good.”

Washington’s Martell Webster drove to the hoop and had his shot blocked by the Spurs’ Kawhi Leonard. After Webster went to the floor, he rolled from behind onto Duncan’s ankle and knee. The big man stayed down on the floor as play continued to the other end where Danny Green scored a layup. Parker then took a foul to stop the clock as the Spurs’ medical staff ran onto the floor.

Duncan was making his return after missing four straight games with a sore left knee. He had eight points, five rebounds and two assists in 13 minutes. Duncan had said that he could have returned for Wednesday’s game against Charlotte, but instead settled for three more days of rest. He’s averaging 17.5 points, 9.8 rebounds, 2.74 blocked shots per game this season and was recently named to the Western Conference All-Star team for the 14th time in his 16-year NBA career.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Timmy like that,” Green said. “I’ve seen him hurt before, the bumps, the bruises. He usually gets right back up. I figured today he was feeling good leg-wise. When we started out, he was playing well, back in rhythm. Seeing him go down, feeling as well as I thought he felt, kind of sucks, not just for him, but for us. We’re gonna need him. On this nice little road trip, a guy like that could help.

“I didn’t get to see the play. I heard it was his knee and ankle at the same time, which seems kind of weird. I don’t know how it happened. I had never seen him get carried off the floor, so I hoped it wasn’t serious and that we would have him at least for part of this road trip.

“We seen him right after the game. He seemed OK. Timmy’s always optimistic. It didn’t seem like it [was serious], but you never know with Timmy. His expressions don’t really tell you what’s going on. He’s always optimistic. He’s one of the greatest guys ever to play this game because he’s a pretty tough guy. He’s played through some pain and some injury, so he’s probably not going to show you he’s hurt like that, even if it was serious. But I think he should be OK.”

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Waitress Takes Out Stephen Jackson

January 3, 2013  ·  11:03PM


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NEW YORK – The New York Knicks crushed the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday with improved defense and, perhaps, an assist from a Madison Square Garden waitress.

We’ve seen players tumble into cameramen under the basket before or get hurt when diving into the crowd, but this is a new one.

With a little less than 3 1/2 minutes to go in the first quarter, the Spurs’ Stephen Jackson missed a corner 3-pointer and took a step backward, where he collided with a waitress squatting just outside the sideline, just in front of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was sitting courtside across from the Knicks’ bench.

Jackson turned his right ankle on the play and couldn’t get back on defense on the ensuing possession, which resulted in a wide-open three for Carmelo Anthony that tied the game at 17. The Spurs were forced to call a timeout and it took Jackson a few minutes to make his way back to the locker room.

Jackson didn’t return to the game, but the waitress was seemingly unaffected. Bloomberg went on to eat a box of popcorn in the second quarter, but did not consume any extra large sodas and did not return to his seat after halftime.

At this point, it’s unknown if Jackson will miss time. The Spurs are 12-3 without Jackson, who previously missed time with a fractured pinkie and who didn’t speak to reporters after the game. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich didn’t comment on the bizarre circumstances of his team’s latest injury.

“I’m going to look at it,” Popovich said. “I didn’t see it.”

Really, Jackson’s injury had nothing to do with the game’s result, which was more about the Knicks’ improved defense and the Spurs’ fatigue. They were playing their fourth game in five nights.

“Too low on fuel, and their defense was too good,” Popovich said. “Bad combination, and then they made shots, which makes it even worse.”

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Ginobili Likely Out As Spurs Get Two Back

December 16, 2012  ·  2:28PM

HANGTIME SOUTHWEST – The San Antonio Spurs could again be without Manu Ginobili after he suffered a contusion to the left quadriceps in a collision with Boston’s Chris Wilcox Saturday night.

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich did not sound optimistic that Ginobili will be fit to play in Monday’s showdown at Oklahoma City.

“He got a thigh contusion just above his knee and one would think he is going to be stiffer than hell tomorrow,” Popovich told reporters after the Spurs beat Boston, 103-88 to improve to 19-6, two games behind the Thunder in the loss column. “It’s hard to believe he’d be ready day after tomorrow for Oklahoma, but I’m not sure.”

The Spurs just hope Ginobili isn’t out for long. The way he gripped his leg on the floor for a few minutes late in the first quarter certainly had everyone holding their breath.

No stranger to sprains, strains and contusions, Ginobili, 35, missed the first two games of the season with back spasms. The only other game he missed was the infamous Miami no-show when Popovich sent four of his regulars home, resulting in a $250,000 fine levied by the league.

Having returned to his sixth man role, Ginobili is averaging 11.5 points a game on 42.1 percent shooting and 35.1 percent from the 3-point arc. While his stats are down, his presence as a creative playmaker and the attention he demands from defenses is impossible to duplicate.

The Spurs are expecting good news this week. Forward Stephen Jackson tweeted that he’s excited about returning to action on Monday against the Thunder. Jackson broke a finger in November.

Second-year forward Kawhi Leonard is also expected back some time this week after missing a month with quad tendinitis.

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Things Change, But Not The Spurs

December 11, 2012  ·  1:40PM

HANG TIME, Texas — Things change.

Isn’t that what they say?

Maybe one day we’ll wake up to find the sun rising in the west, gravity no longer holding our feet onto the ground and the NBA’s most low-profile elite franchise going all Lindsay Lohan for the tabloids.

Six weeks into the season and the headlines out of San Antonio have been the $250,000 fine for “Popgate,” the Internet furor over the Halloween prank photo showing Tony Parker and Tim Duncan “attacking” a made-up referee Joe Crawford, and then Stephen Jackson got nicked for $25,000 for his threatening tweet about Serge Ibaka.

All that might be missing is the “Bad boy, bad boys…” music from “COPS” playing during the introduction of starting lineups.

So here came coach Gregg Popovich out of the locker room prior to Monday night’s game in Houston dressed head-to-toe in black, in keeping with the Spurs’ new bad boy image?

“It was clean,” Pop said, laughing. “It was the first thing I saw hanging in my closet and I had to take one. It’s not a message. There’s no gothic message here or anything like that.”

Indeed, the only directive delivered from the opening day of training camp was Popovich’s belief that his team had surrendered its identity to the Thunder after building a 2-0 lead in the Western Conference finals last June, failing to share the ball on offense at crunch time in four straight losses and never really making a commitment to defense.

“We were mediocre last year defensively,” he said.

Their 134-126 overtime ABA throwback win over the Rockets notwithstanding, the message has been heeded.

The Spurs are back with a league-best 18-4 record because they are back to minding virtually all of the details at both ends of the court. They are the first team since the 2001 Kings to rank in the top five in the NBA in offense, defense and pace of play.

They have done this while playing the most travel-wearying schedule in the league to date. The stop in Houston was already their 13th away game and the Spurs won 11 of them, giving them more road wins than 16 other NBA teams have total wins on the season.

They have done it piling up injuries at the small forward position that have already kept Kawhi Leonard out of 13 games and Jackson out a dozen and counting.

The Spurs have done it because their bench has stepped up in a big way, because the 36-year-old Duncan is playing at a level close to his MVP seasons, and Parker continues his ascendance as the driving force in the offense, evidenced by his first career triple-double — and the first by a Spurs guard since 1986 — against the Rockets.

They do it because even on a night when Duncan shoots just 1-for-9 from the field, he pulled down seven of his 13 rebounds in the fourth quarter and OT and took a page from Tom Brady’s Monday Night Football playbook and heaved a long “touchdown” pass that Manu Ginobili turned into a clinching three-point play.

While the young Thunder keep streaking, the Grizzlies keep flexing their muscles and the Knicks keep surprising, the Spurs just keep doing what they’ve always done, even in a season when they’ve attracted more attention for their sins than their wins.

“It’s drama to other people, but things happen and we move on,” Popovich said. “We don’t even discuss it. Nobody even talks about it.”

Things change.

Just not the Spurs.

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Banged-up Spurs Begin Six-Game Road Trip

November 21, 2012  ·  11:28AM


HANGTIME SOUTHWEST – Five days ago the San Antonio Spurs were the picture of good health, one of just two NBA teams with a clean injury slate. Now, as they begin a six-game, 10-day road trip through the Eastern Conference, two key injuries have the Spurs plugging holes with D-League reinforcements.

Starting small forward Kawhi Leonard (knee) could return by the fifth game of the trip (at Orlando in a week) and reserve small forward Stephen Jackson (finger) will miss all of it, and more. Jackson is expected to be out four to six weeks after he fractured his right pinkie finger Monday night.

Combined, the pair averages 18.3 points and 9.7 rebounds. Beyond the stats, Leonard is a tough wing defender and he helps spread the floor offensively as a 3-point threat. The veteran Jackson obviously delivers jolts of energy and attitude at both ends of the floor.

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich loves to rotate players and the injuries will make that more difficult to accomplish when most needed on a long road trip that winds through Boston, Indiana, Toronto, Washington, Orlando and finally Miami, and includes two back-to-backs. Through 11 games — with the Spurs quietly at 8-3 — Popovich has used 10 players for at least 16 minutes a game with only two players – Tim Duncan and Tony Parker – averaging at least 30 minutes (both are at a very reasonable 30.5).

“It hurts numbers-wise,” Duncan said following Monday’s loss home loss to the Clippers. “Obviously, what they mean to the team skill-wise and being out on the floor and making shots and all the rest of that stuff, numbers-wise we actually had some guys step up. Matty (Bonner) got back in there and played well. Nando (De Colo) got an opportunity, so we’re just going to have to keep shuffling and see what we get out of it.”

On Wednesday, the Spurs recalled guard Cory Joseph from their D-League affiliate in Austin and signed former draft pick James Anderson, a 6-foot-6 shooting guard who was playing for the D-League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers.

But, old hands like Bonner, whose customary 20 minutes a game over the last four seasons has been sliced in half this season, in-and-out-of-favor DeJuan Blair and the inconsistent Tiago Splitter will have to pick up more minutes and help out the rejuvenated Duncan (18.0 ppg, 10.0 rpg) on the boards, the one area the Spurs collectively have lacked, ranking 24th in the league in rebounding differential and near the bottom in giving up offensive rebounds.

“Obviously we lose a lot of size with Jack and Kawhi, so that’s going to be a disadvantage for us at that 3-position,” Duncan said. “We’re going to ask them to do a lot more of that rebounding and rebound their area, but it’s on all of us. We know what we have to do. We know where we’re being hurt, and definitely the offensive glass is one of them.”

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Popovich Roasts Spurs: ‘We Were An Embarrassment’

November 20, 2012  ·  8:25AM

HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – This hasn’t always been the case, but there is no shame in losing to the Los Angeles Clippers these days. They are among the NBA elite and one of the few squads capable of going into San Antonio and dropping the hometown team on a given night.

Just don’t tell that to Spurs coach Gregg Popovich (above), whose choice words for his team after Monday night’s 92-87 loss could not be confused. Not only did his Spurs lose, but Popovich roasted them for an uneven effort against a fellow Western Conference contender in a way that only a couple of his peers (Doc Rivers and George Karl, maybe) could do without offending the sensibilities of the whole locker room.

And even if he did set off a few alarms in his locker room with his comments, Popovich has the resume (not to mention the game tape) to back up his words.

“Of all of our games, this is in the soft category,” he said calmly. “We never had five guys that competed hard enough to win the basketball game, the Clippers took it with their aggressiveness and toughness, both mentally and physically. And I thought for a portion of that game we were an embarrassment. So we’ve got to look at that and look at the film and make sure everybody understands that this is a game that has to be played with competitiveness for 48 minutes. And that’s the bottom line.”

This is the second time this season the Clippers have staggered the mighty Spurs, so maybe Popovich senses that this is more than just a bad night. The Clippers wore them out 106-84 two weeks ago today at Staples Center. Last night’s win provided the Clippers with multiple wins over the Spurs in the same season for the first time since the 1996-97 season. That fact no doubt irks Popovich even more, especially considering these two could see each other down the line somewhere … perhaps even in the postseason.

Maybe he was trying to make sure Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan recognize the threat that the Clippers have become with Chris Paul at the helm?

“They are legit,” Popovich said of the Clippers before the game.

In his team’s defense, the Spurs did lose Stephen Jackson to a broken finger (he’s expected to miss anywhere from four to six weeks). And Kawhi Leonard (quadriceps tendinitis) wasn’t available.

But that still doesn’t explain the Spurs’ second quarter meltdown that saw the Clippers outscore them 29-14 as the Spurs shot a putrid 3-for-8 from the floor and committed seven turnovers.

That might be the stretch of “embarrassment” Popovich referred to.

All that said, the Spurs are a healthy 8-3 on the season and have handed out their fair share of beatings. But 11 games seems like more than enough time for Popovich to formulate a properly nuanced message or two for his team in regards to where they stand against the rest of the best in the Western Conference.

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Stephen Jackson’s ‘Around-The-World 3-Point Challenge’ (Video)

September 13, 2012  ·  7:56AM

HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – You think you can shoot it from deep?

So does Spurs swingman and reality TV star in training Stephen Jackson.

But he’s not just talking about it. He’s backing it up with hard work and his “Around-The-World 3-Point Challenge” (video courtesy of our friends at NOC):

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Will Finances Force Thunder’s Hand With Harden?

September 11, 2012  ·  9:56AM

HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – This isn’t about scare tactics or some sort of negotiating ploy on the part of the Thunder or anyone else.

The Oklahoma City Thunder’s quandary regarding reigning Kia Sixth Man of the Year James Harden is real. They have to figure out how to keep him in the fold when he’s set to cash in with a new contract while the franchise is already somewhat strapped due to big deals it handed out to its other young stars (Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka).

The luxury tax is a very real factor for some teams. If you paid attention during the first five minutes of Junior Achievement in middle school, you’d know that the numbers simply do not add up in favor of the team trying to keep a handful of young stars in their primes with generous contracts. The Thunder — a proud, small-market titan — happen to be one of those teams.

And there is a growing concern in Oklahoma City that Harden could end up being a casualty of the financial dilemma the Thunder will face at the end of the 2012-13 season. Thunder general manager Sam Presti addressed the topic Monday, courtesy of Jenni Carlson of the Oklahoman:

So, what about Harden?

“James is somebody we value,” Presti said Monday afternoon. “We think he’s an important part to what we’re trying to do with our team and we’re hopeful that he’ll be with us.”

No doubt about that. Harden is super talented, a rare combination of shooter, slasher and distributor. His offensive skills provide an amazing complement to those of Durant and Westbrook.

“By the same token, we’ve been very upfront and transparent with everybody that we have some inherent challenges that we face as an organization as a result of the new collective bargaining agreement,” the Thunder general manager continued. “I know we’d love to have him here. I think James would like to be here as well. But at the end of the day … you have to find a way to make it work for everybody.”

(more…)

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Tony Allen’s Skills Camp/The Grit And Grind Basketball Academy (Video)

September 6, 2012  ·  10:25AM

HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – When they take roll at training camps around the league next month and players have to explain what they did over the summer, 99 percent of them will talk about the basketball camps they put on.

You already saw how Spurs sharpshooter Stephen Jackson does it.

But in Memphis, where Grit & Grind has morphed from a slogan to an actual movement, Tony Allen has the little ones grinding the Grizzlies way:

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