Nice article about Spurs approach. They thought outside the box and it paid off. No doubt having Duncan was huge but they kept him surrounded with players via a different approach.
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October 14, 2013
Spurs Stay Consistent by Thinking Globally
By JERÉ LONGMAN
SAN ANTONIO — When the San Antonio Spurs sent an intern to Argentina in July to ferry a new contract to guard Manu Ginobili, it seemed a routine trip. The Spurs preferred hand delivery to the mail. A previous contract had been brought for Ginobili to sign on his honeymoon.
Hours before the Spurs’ intern was to fly home from Buenos Aires, team officials said that he was strafed by a bird in a park. As he tidied up at a fountain, his backpack disappeared. Inside were Ginobili’s signed contract, along with the intern’s passport, cellphone and laptop.
Luckily, an international sports crisis was averted. An assistant traveling to Buenos Aires soon after brought a fresh contract and returned it to Texas without incident.
“No birds got to him,” Sean Marks, the Spurs’ director of basketball operations, said with a laugh. “We were all waiting for Manu’s contract to show up on eBay. It hasn’t yet.”
Over the past 25 years, San Antonio has become one of the most ambitiously global sports franchises in North America. During the 2013 N.B.A. finals against Miami, the Spurs’ 15-man roster included nine players born outside the continental United States, a league record. After the playoffs, San Antonio signed a 10th international player — Marco Belinelli of Italy — and drafted a forward from France.
The benefits of this embrace of intercontinental basketball have been clear: four championships won since 1999 with fluid movement, selfless passing and insistent defense.
The drama with Ginobili’s contract aside, San Antonio’s immersion into global basketball has produced a run of prodigious consistency. The Spurs have won 50 or more games for 14 consecutive seasons and have reached the playoffs 16 straight years, the longest current streak in the league. On a late August morning, during an off-season workout, Tim Duncan, the almost-certain Hall of Fame forward from the United States Virgin Islands, prepared his 37-year-old body for another grind of a season. Joining him were centers Tiago Splitter of Brazil and Aron Baynes of Australia. There was also Marks, the director of basketball operations, who is from New Zealand, and Ime Udoka, an assistant who played for the Nigerian national team. Daisuke Yamaguchi, an assistant athletic trainer from Japan, monitored the workout.
“All I think we’ve done is we’ve looked at basketball players and not tried to put a border to them,” said R. C. Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, from Wichita, Kan. “Let’s not worry where they’re from, let’s worry about how they play and what their character is and their interest in being part of a team.”
San Antonio’s basketball worldview reflects the curiosity, open-mindedness and acumen of Gregg Popovich, the Spurs’ coach, who in his 18th season is the longest-tenured coach in the four major professional sports in the United States.
A 1970 graduate of the Air Force Academy with a degree in Soviet studies, Popovich, 64, toured Eastern Europe with teams representing the Armed Forces and the Amateur Athletic Union during the cold war and later served as an intelligence officer. Known as Pop, he also toured South America playing exhibitions after the 1972 Munich Olympics. Although he can sometimes be wary of reporters’ questions, Popovich is widely popular in the N.B.A. and is known as a coach with an ecumenical interest in food, wine, politics and current events.
“It’s a mecca for international players,” Vlade Divac, a former N.B.A. center who is president of the Serbian Olympic Committee, said of San Antonio. “Pop was the guy who opened the doors. You know that if you go there, you will get a chance to show what you can do.”
San Antonio’s reliance on international players also reflects a pragmatism necessitated by seldom having an early pick in the draft. Duncan was selected with the No. 1 overall pick in 1997 out of Wake Forest; since then, the Spurs have drafted no higher than 20th place in the first round, long after the top-rated American-born collegiate players have been selected.
International basketball players, like soccer players, tend to develop in club systems rather than in school-based systems. Thus, there are few limits on practice time compared with American high schools and colleges — or in some cases none. Coaching tends to be centrally structured through national federations, with an emphasis on fundamentals and teamwork. Exposure to international play is high, beginning at the youth level.
And global players often turn professional at an age when American players are just qualifying for their driver’s license. Splitter, San Antonio’s Brazilian center, signed his first pro contract at 15.
Baynes, the Australian center, attended Washington State and then played professionally in Lithuania, Germany, Greece and Slovenia before joining the Spurs last January. He said: “In Europe we had 15-year-olds training with us every day. When I first started, no way I would have had the confidence to step out there and play with some of these guys. But in Europe, I saw guys competing with grown men every day. It makes them better.”
Popovich, who is of Serbian and Croatian heritage, was born into a diverse neighborhood in East Chicago, Ind. When he toured Eastern Europe and South America as a military player in the 1970s, “it didn’t matter whether it was Czechoslovakia or Argentina or Brazil,” he said, “here were great players everywhere.”
When Popovich became an assistant with the Spurs in 1988, he urged the team to enhance its international scouting. In September of that year, the Soviet Union defeated a team of American amateurs at the Seoul Olympics. Yugoslavia won the silver medal, and the United States settled for bronze.
In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Popovich persuaded the Spurs to sign the Yugoslavian forward Zarko Paspalj, who was a steady shooter, a vaulting jumper and a willing passer. But it hardly mattered.
At the time, N.B.A. rosters included only five players from Eastern Europe. There was a widespread perception, Popovich said, that international players were uncoachable because they did not fit in socially, grew homesick, did not speak English fluently and did not play defense. There also seemed to be a reluctance to travel widely to scout global players.
“All those things together formed a prejudice,” Popovich said.
Larry Brown, the highly respected and peripatetic coach then in San Antonio, had familiar suspicions about international players. Also, the Spurs had just drafted a forward out of Arizona named Sean Elliott. Paspalj appeared in only 28 games and averaged a meager 2.6 points in the 1989-90 season, his only one with the Spurs, and then became a celebrated player in Greece’s pro league.
“Zarko could have had a 47-inch vertical jump and been the best shooter in the world, and it wasn’t going to happen because Sean Elliott was the American who had been drafted,” Popovich said.
It also apparently did not help that Paspalj, a garrulous character, had seldom been asked to play defense in his career and adhered to a training regimen that included copious amounts of pizza and cigarettes.
Popovich believed so strongly in Paspalj that he invited the forward to live with him. And he took Paspalj to a clinic in Boston, where a Russian doctor was supposed to be expert at curing smoking through hypnosis. Alas, the cure remained elusive.
After Popovich picked up Paspalj from the doctor’s office in a taxi, he turned to give the driver directions. He then looked over to see Paspalj lighting up a cigarette.
In 1992, the United States somewhat reluctantly sent Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and other Dream Team pros to play at the Barcelona Olympics. At the time, the N.B.A. had fewer than two dozen international players, representing 18 countries.
But attitudes began to shift after those Olympics. David Stern, the N.B.A.’s longtime commissioner, has made international exposure of the league a high priority. The league has opened offices in 14 global markets, played about 145 exhibition and regular-season games in international cities and expanded television coverage to 215 countries and territories, in 47 languages.
Last season, N.B.A. rosters featured 85 players from 36 nations and territories. In the first round of the 2013 draft, 12 international players were selected, a league record. The transformation has been striking, but the presence of international players does not guarantee N.B.A. championships. The Miami Heat won the 2013 title with one international player, and he was from Canada. Still, the global model — as evidenced by San Antonio’s top three players, Duncan, Ginobili and the French point guard Tony Parker — has helped make the Spurs reliable. Ten or 15 years ago, international players began to seem less entitled and more fundamentally sound than some American players, Popovich said.
“We became more and more of a highlight-film, ESPN sort of sport, where people just practiced dunking and doing individual things and got away from the real basics — the team play, ball movement, people movement,” Popovich said. “I think we’ve started to get back to that now. The pendulum has definitely changed.”
The universal aspect of the Spurs helps fosters cultural sharing and trust among players and can be a source of entertainment on exhaustive trips, said Marks, the director of basketball operations, who also played for San Antonio.
Popovich is incurably inquisitive, Marks added, and is likely to ask Baynes and guard Patty Mills about wildfires in Australia, quiz Ginobili about politics in Argentina and grill Parker about the latest Beaujolais.
“The team being so multicultural, it forces guys to communicate, to go out to dinner, to tell their stories,” Marks said. “It forces them to figure out that Australia is not part of New Zealand. And it gives Pop a unique avenue to reach out to those guys. One of his messages is, ‘Life is much bigger than basketball.’ ”
Two seasons ago during a Lenten abstinence, Yamaguchi, the assistant athletic trainer from Japan, said he refrained from eating with chopsticks, and forward Matt Bonner agreed to eat with nothing else. Bonner is from New Hampshire, which, according to Yamaguchi, makes him “kind of Canadian.” In any case, Bonner’s dedication was impressive.
“I told him it was O.K. to use a spoon for soup,” Yamaguchi said with a laugh. “But he said, ‘No, I’ll stick with it.’ ”
A similar dexterity is required to handle the financial and legal aspects of international basketball. Players routinely must buy out their contracts with European teams when they join the N.B.A. And the league, which operates under a salary cap, limits its franchises to a maximum contribution of $500,000 toward a buyout. The player must pay the rest.
A prohibitive buyout clause undermined an attempt by the Spurs in 2005 to sign one of their former draft picks, forward Luis Scola of Argentina. Scola reportedly would have had to pay $2.5 million out of his own pocket to gain release from his Spanish club team. The Spurs traded his rights to Houston, and Scola now plays with Indiana.
The P-1 visa, by which international athletes and entertainers enter the United States, also has its complexities. A new visa must be applied for each time a player changes teams. And if the player is in the United States when he applies, Spurs officials said, he must leave for an interview at an American consulate or embassy and then re-enter to receive a special passport stamp.
This requirement, the team said, extended a planned two-day visit to Mexico City into a weeklong stay in March 2012 when Mills, the Australian guard, signed with San Antonio after having played the previous season in Portland.
“We were told his visa was approved and was sitting on somebody’s desk waiting to be stamped,” Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, said of Mills. “Our games are going on, we’re wanting to get him back here to play, and he’s sitting down there having margaritas.”
10/18/2013 1:50 PM