After Manu Ginobili took two charges in the 4th quarter against the Pistons, a debate on flopping started in the comments. It involved both Spurs and Pistons fans and it was friendly and illuminating for the most part. Flopping is a sensitive issue for NBA fans, as we've all been on the wrong side of a call. I've been meaning to write something on the subject for a long while now, and hearing everybody's opinion was just the stimulus I needed to get it done. Here are my thoughts.
Today is the first day of its kind in the season. It's a second day in a row without a Spurs game. Pop doesn't run a practice for the team unless there are at least two days off between games, which means that they're likely going 5 on 5 today, full court, and Manu Ginobili is being tested by his teammates, evaluated by the coaches, and hovered over by the trainers. There's no new news to be expected today, so it's the perfect time for me to hearken back to my earliest memories of growing up in Houston, Texas as a fan of the NBA, and share with you a story that I've been wanting to write for a long time.
via ww1.hdnux.com
I have some random Spurs thoughts that I thought I'd put down on screen and share them with you all. I'll call them ponderings:
This just in, Tony Parker and Tim Duncan are good, really good. Anybody who says that either of them shouldn't be an All-Star is just a hater. You cannot name 3 point guards playing better than Parker right now (if you can, you shouldn't because it will ruin my point). The man has turned into a passing machine averaging 7.7 dimes per game. A career high. He's still as good as ever at scoring and quite frankly he's just better than most people think. Duncan isn't his old self, I went and looked at his numbers from the past and they are redunkulous. That said, he's still a top 3-5 big man in the entire NBA these days. Who would you rather have? Dwight Howard, Kevin Love, maybe Pau Gasol and then.....Bynum? Chandler? Bogut? Nene? Griffin? Pass. There's not a team in the NBA who wouldn't improve drastically with him on the roster. These two guys have carried the Spurs in the absences of Manu Ginobili and the team has improved thanks to their leadership.
A thought came over me as I watched the Spurs pull one out over the Hornets the other night. I kind of toyed around with it before placing it on the back burner out of the necessity having more to it than simply being a thought. After last night's game against Atlanta, however, I decided that I would rather have this be as short and sweet as I could possibly make it, and have some of the long-windedness I usually tend to replaced with the essence of the truth that surrounds the matter as I see it. To be perfectly clear, it wasn't even the game itself that returned the thought to the forefront of my mind; it was merely the write-up of the game on ESPN's site.
Editor's Note: Yesterday, we posted the PtR debut of DewNO, Part 1 of Manu and Borges: The Infinite Chase. If you haven't already checked it out, please do so in order to fully enjoy Part 2 below. I can't tell you how excited I am about DewNO's writing for our fair blog for what I hope will be a long time. If, like me, you just can't get enough of his writing, you can see more of his work at GothicGinobili.com and read anything by Alex. - JRW
The San Antonio Spurs' Manu Ginobili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game - there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.
Shane Battier in "The No-Stats All-Star" - New York Times, 2009
"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books." -Borges
Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel. Sure, he read a lot: Borges read libraries' worth and had a love of knowledge of every sort, from epics and religious texts to philosophy and films. And yet, for all the dense, obscure - above all long and many - things he'd read, Borges loved nothing more than a tiny, unnoticed detail: a clever interpretation of something, a strange fable buried on page 78, a paradoxical trait of character in a line that was probably left accidentally by an unwitting author. A smile that shouldn't be there. I'd say most of us as fans notice and love these little occasional details about the Spurs that flesh out their culture, their opponents, their personalities, and their games. The lineups that exist to troll the defensive-minded fan, the offensive rebounding machines that can't hit a shot in ten tries, the inexplicable passivity of Richard Jefferson in passing up his favorite shot with miles of open space. Okay, it's not all love, but you get what I'm saying here, right? The details matter, and the details are fun and give what we're watching on the screen a third dimension (the fourth dimension is PtR and the shared experience of being a fan, right? Heh.)
His field goal percentage was nearly sixty percent. He was hitting over half of his three point attempts, and ninety-three percent of his free throws. He scored right at 20 points per game in less than 26 minutes of playing time. When you throw in his rebounds, assists, steals and defense you begin to see that this wasn't just the beginning of any season. Through the first five games, Manu Ginobili was on fire.
Hey! How's it going? Some of you may remember me from last season. I carried last season's burden of attending Spurs home games and writing about the fun I had. Sad, right? Well, due to new/additional responsibilities at work, volunteering as a teacher, and my first house, I just don't have the time to scuttle down to the ol' AT&T Center for some pink chicken and Manu Magic anymore. Plus, Mrs. Preine actually enjoys having me around. Fancy that.
Your new guide to inside the Spurs World, Scrappy Doo (one heck of a writer), was unable to make it to the Clippers beat down the other night, so the boss man asked if I, while on holiday vacation, would fill in.
Hell. Yes.
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