![]() ![]() Enjoy him-and appreciate him-while you still can.” SLAMonline Top 50 Players 2011 At 33 years old, his career is probably winding down. With his quick wit, quiet grace, no-nonsense approach to the game and always, always perfect positioning, Tim Duncan playing basketball is poetry personified. His career numbers are dizzying, but Duncan has never been about the stats. ![]() Over 12 seasons, he’s accumulated one Rookie of the Year award, two MVPs, three Finals MVPs, four championships, nine First Team All-NBA appearances and 11 All-Star Game invites. “Tim Duncan is the best power forward to ever play basketball. Here’s what I wrote about Duncan two years ago, and I think it still holds true today: Like him or hate him, he’s earned our respect. But he’s the greatest power forward in NBA history. I know he doesn’t sell magazines, and he won’t have a signature shoe dropping anytime soon, and he won’t be on the front of any video games. In 2009, when we did our list of the greatest players of all time, I wanted to write about Duncan. He was like Watson the supercomputer with legs and arms.īut really, Duncan’s robotic personality spoke to his greatness, and his ability to tune out all the noise and, night after night, crush his opponents. We didn’t know very much about him, and whenever he spoke, which wasn’t often, it was mostly rote and unrevealing. It was based mostly on Duncan’s public persona, which was really more of a lack of a persona. I used to have a running gag in The Links about Tim Duncan actually being a robot that was designed to be dominant at basketball. And if recognizing the value of Tim Duncan makes me old, well… call me Methuselah. I don’t know if the general basketball watcher gets all that when they see Tim Duncan play these days. He still can get up and block a shot, still put down a peaceful little one-handed dunk. TIM DUNCAN SERIESHe understands the angles, as if he sees the game as a series of binary numbers. He still pump fakes guys into the first row. If you weren’t sure, the numbers should confirm that Duncan is no longer the player he was a decade ago.īut he’s still dope. He averaged just under 29 minutes per game, and only about 11 shot attempts per game, also career lows. He finished the year averaging 13.4 points and 8.9 rebounds per game, both career lows. Last season was probably Duncan’s worst NBA season, at least statistically. He fit in, but he also stood out, and all of that together turned one of the NBA’s smallest markets into one of its most powerful dynasties. But then, Duncan made all those things work for him. There will be those who say Duncan was mostly the product of the system he played in, surrounded with talented teammates, coached by a brilliant coach, with a terrific GM pulling the strings. But as I aged and my life and dreams started being lived closer and closer to the ground, I grew to have more of an affinity and appreciation for those who played basketball a bit closer to the ground. When I was a kid, I probably wouldn’t have got it. ![]() I fully understand that Tim Duncan’s game isn’t for everyone. So perhaps, even just subconsciously, I correlated dunking ability with greatness, or at least believed that the better a dunker someone was, the more likely they were to be great. Even though it was only an exhibition, I was furious when Michael Jordan was awarded the 1987 Dunk Contest ahead of a clearly superior Dominique. Because I lived in Atlanta, I got a steady diet of Dominique Wilkins and his windmills and double-pumps. Growing up, I was the guy who had all the NBA Entertainment compilation dunk videotapes, and I watched “Inside Stuff” every week just for the opportunity to see any dunks I might have missed. By Lang Whitaker | some point over the last few years, I got old. ![]()
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