You know the Moneyball story (who am I kidding, you’re at this blog, of course you know it! That said, I love repeating parts of it.) A small market team with no hope of attracting or retaining top talent finds a way to compete by exploiting market inefficiencies and using advanced stats. Now there’s often a question of if that could happen in the NBA. The answer is that it already has! And the team that is doing it is the San Antonio Spurs.
Now, most people won’t dispute the Spurs are a small market team. Saying this still feels wrong. After all, the Spurs have had the good fortune of getting one of the top centers of all time and one of the top power forwards of all time. They won their first title on the back of two #1 draft picks playing great. And yet, the truth is the Spurs have stayed great. They stayed great in the face of David Robinson retiring. They’ve stayed great in the face of Tim Duncan aging like milk. Wrap your head around this, since the 1997-1998 season the Spurs have won fourteen consecutive 50 game seasons (if you adjust the 1999 lockout season to 82 games). With just one more win this season they’ll stretch that to fifteen consecutive seasons. It’s all been Duncan right?
Of course not! Don’t get me wrong, you need a superstar to compete. But you can’t put them out there with nothing. They need a good surrounding cast to be competitive and the Spurs have put out great casts over and over. They’ve been good for too long! They haven’t had the luxury of great picks like Chicago and Oklahoma City or being a premier destination like Miami. Yet, they are one of just four teams to have crossed the forty win mark this season. Let’s take a look at where the Spurs’ production is coming from currently..
Get the rest of this article over at the Wages of Wins Journal.