Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

Some in the league office didn’t find these types of roster manipulations funny, and the issue came to a head early in the following season, when the Spurs elected to send Duncan, Parker, Ginobili, and swingman Danny Green home before the end of a six-game road trip, having them miss the Spurs’ lone game in Miami that season. It didn’t help the Spurs’ cause that the game was a national TV broadcast, and no league wants to irk its big-money broadcast partners. After playing shorthanded and losing a tough game to LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and the Heat, the Spurs were fined $250,000 by then-commissioner David Stern for violating league rules by resting players in a manner that was “contrary to the best interests of the NBA.”

  In a statement released by the league, Stern explained that “the result here is dictated by the totality of the facts in this case. The Spurs decided to make four of their top players unavailable for an early-season game that was the team’s only regular-season visit to Miami. The team also did this without informing the Heat, the media, or the league office in a timely way. Under these circumstances, I have concluded that the Spurs did a disservice to the league and our fans.”

  Interestingly, it was James himself who triggered an initial discussion of the rights of a team to strategically rest its players when Cleveland sat him for four straight games late in the 2009–10 season to help him recover ahead of what was expected to be a lengthy playoff run. At a subsequent owners’ meeting in New York, Stern discussed the issue with his constituents and noted that there was “no conclusion reached, other than a number of teams thought it should be at the sole discretion of the team, the coach, the general manager, and I think it’s fair to say I agree with that, unless that discretion is abused.”

  Since the Miami incident, the Spurs and Popovich have become more prudent in the way they strategically utilize their roster, but they continue to do so, and with good reason. At a base level, Popovich, general manager RC Buford, and their lieutenants do a masterful job of identifying players that will fit into the Spurs’ culture and basketball systems, and then Popovich is able to achieve the equally difficult task of maintaining their readiness throughout the season. That successful nexus is how the Spurs annually seem to have quality depth options at bargain prices. The Spurs typically still play well when they’re shorthanded, and research into the strategy—and the whole structure of the Spurs’ roster—illuminates just how they manage to pull that off.

  In a November 2014 column at The Cauldron, Ian Levy looked at the way the Spurs handled their minutes during the 2013–14 season (one in which the Spurs ended up winning the NBA title after no one on the roster averaged more than thirty minutes a game during the regular season), and noted that, while the top four players on the Spurs played fewer minutes on average than their counterparts on other NBA teams, the rest of the roster (players five through twelve) played more minutes than average. Levy detailed this in the graphic shown below:

  This in itself isn’t a surprise for a team that has older stars, quality depth that allows them to go deeper into their bench, and finds itself in a fair number of blowout wins, which means they can pull their best players earlier in the contest. What was much more compelling, though, was that the Spurs were getting significantly more impact from their deeper rotation players than the average NBA team. Levy charted a stat called “box plus-minus” (which measures a player’s approximate impact when he’s on the floor), against the players’ total minutes distributions, and painted a really interesting picture:

  Levy’s second chart shows that the Spurs basically got the same composite level of production from their top three players as other NBA teams do. San Antonio’s top minutes guy (Duncan) was better overall than the NBA average while the second- and third-most heavy minutes guys (surprisingly, shooting guard Marco Belinelli and point guard Tony Parker) were slightly worse.

  Look at the rest of that chart, though. Where the NBA at large sees a continued drop-off in on-court impact, with no average player from number four in minutes through the end of the bench even having a positive box plus-minus rating, every single Spur from four through twelve was positive, and the players in positions four through nine were highly positive contributors.

  The initial jump in the Spurs’ curve comes from the number two through five players being very close in minutes, along with Kawhi Leonard’s (number five in overall minutes) emergence as a bona fide star. The curve beyond that, though, tracks on a path similar to the NBA average, just three to four net points above the trend for every spot. The result, according to Levy, is that “spreading minutes more evenly is not the sacrifice for the Spurs that it is for most other teams in the league. In fact, if you use the ratings of each Spurs player from last season, but redistribute their minutes so as to match the league average pattern, their projected net rating changes a whopping . . . 0.1 points per one hundred possessions. That difference is small enough that it wouldn’t even affect San Antonio’s win projection across the entire season. Their sacrifice really isn’t a sacrifice at all.”

  Basically, because of San Antonio’s quality of depth, the way in which they shaved minutes for their main players and allocated them to supposedly lesser ones didn’t impact them at all during the regular season. Popovich, in 2013–14 at least, was able to make sure his best players got as much rest as they could, and saw no impact on the Spurs’ overall record. That’s an amazing advantage, especially in a league where being healthy in the playoffs is paramount. The relative freshness showed up in profound fashion in the final three games of that season’s NBA Finals, when the Spurs played some of the best offensive basketball in recent memory to vaporize a worn-down Heat team, closing Miami out in five games for the franchise’s fifth championship.

  While the conclusions are compelling on paper, it still takes proper man management from Popovich and buy-in from all of his players to make things work. While it may seem from the outside that the Spurs make it easy, plugging and playing whomever to cover for the absence of someone else, it’s not, and on this night in Denver, after a 99–91 Spurs victory, Duncan explained how the series of injuries—especially at the point guard position—was affecting these Spurs.

  “It does impact us. It impacts us tremendously, but we find a way to adjust,” he said. “We’re not going to sit back and complain about our depth. Those guys are going to step up, and luckily we have some guys like Manu [Ginobili], who’s been here for a long time and understands what [the team] wants and needs to be done. Marco [Belinelli]’s still figuring out his way, but we trust him with the ball, as well. And luckily, we run an offense where a lot of people touch the ball, so we’re not needing one guy to sit there and set everything up for us, so that plays to our strengths.”

  Before the game, Popovich noted that he had been “managing” the Spurs through NBA seasons for two decades, so this particular one—while daunting—didn’t provide any challenges he hadn’t seen before. Duncan, who arrived for Popovich’s second season on the bench and has never left, agreed that the way Popovich managed the team makes a lot of sense for them.

  “Pop’s a master of that,” Duncan said about his coach’s ability to strategically utilize the roster. “He’s been through enough seasons that he understands what we want to do and we have to rest at times. The guys, the players, we want to go out there and play every game, but that’s really going to wear us down at some point, so there’s a happy medium there somewhere. We can keep minutes down and sometimes [when we] play back-to-backs, sometimes the older guys can’t. We just have to play it by ear and see how everyone feels.”

  Does Duncan, who has forged one of sport’s most powerful and successful bonds with his head coach, get any say in when he rests as the team’s enduring superstar and eldest statesman?

  “No, I’ve never gotten an opinion,” he semi-deadpanned, going against published accounts of his relationship with Popovich. “I just show up for the games.”

  As much as the coach played it down and the star player joked about it, though, all of the injuries
and the schedule and their age seemed to take a toll on the 2014–15 Spurs. While only Leonard ended up playing more than thirty minutes a game for the season (Duncan ended up at 28.9 minutes), there was a much bigger concentration of production in San Antonio’s top three minutes guys (including Green) than the year before, along with a huge drop-off in support from the players in spots four through twelve.

  All three of Leonard, Duncan, and Green finished with box plus-minuses (BPM) of at least 5, which placed all of them in the top thirteen in the entire NBA for players who played at least one thousand minutes. The trio more than tripled the previous season’s combined BPM for the team’s top three in minutes played. But after that, San Antonio was a mess.

  Parker never really fully found his health or his stride and turned in the poorest season of his career, his diminished offensive productivity no longer offsetting his steadily worsening defense as he ages at what’s now a very athletic position across the league. Boris Diaw, who had been a huge positive the season before, was barely positive at a BPM of 0.1, and four other players besides Parker also finished with a negative BPM for the season. The Spurs’ BPM curve got much, much steeper than the season before, and the back end of the team’s rotation became much closer to an average NBA bench than an elite one.

  The combination of all of that ended up being too much to overcome. The Spurs lost at Memphis on the final night of the regular season to drop from the number two seed to number six in the ultra-compact Western Conference playoff order. They then were beaten in the first round after seven incredible games with the Los Angeles Clippers. In that series, neither Leonard’s nor Green’s performances were of the same caliber as their regular seasons, and Parker went from bad to abysmal, shooting just 36 percent from the field while not making a 3-pointer the entire series (on nine tries). And with Popovich distributing minutes in a more staggered fashion than during the regular season (Duncan and Leonard both played almost thirty-six minutes a game in the series), even improved play from the back of the rotation wasn’t quite enough to save them against a very good opponent.

  It’s no coincidence that the Spurs subsequently re-signed Leonard and Green to long-term contracts, then lured former Portland Trail Blazers standout forward LaMarcus Aldridge in free agency. While no one knows when the Tim Duncan era will finally end in San Antonio, the Spurs did everything possible to make sure his supporting cast was much better than it was in 2014–15.

  The 76ers and Tanking’s Sneaky Side Benefits

  The question was posed while sitting in the well-appointed office of Philadelphia 76ers (and New Jersey Devils) CEO Scott O’Neil, a handful of long outlet passes away from the Wells Fargo Center in the Philadelphia Navy Yards complex hard by the Delaware River. Would the team’s notoriously tight-lipped and media-averse general manager, Sam Hinkie, be willing to discuss the club’s analytics approach that’s fueled the most hotly debated team rebuilding strategy in sports?

  O’Neil pondered the request briefly before saying, somewhat matter-of-factly, “Yeah, Sam probably won’t talk to you. He doesn’t talk to anybody.”

  That much is unequivocally true. Hinkie, who came to the franchise from the Houston Rockets in 2013 after having worked under chattier statsmaster Daryl Morey, does not talk on the record (or, really, very much off the record, either) about the masterplan for the 76ers, who at the time of this conversation were moving through the second season of a radical long-term overhaul. Hinkie’s reticence, though, didn’t stop other people from talking about the 76ers, and those people had very strong opinions on what the team was doing.

  After replacing Tony DiLeo in the aftermath of the 76ers’ disastrous trade for Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who never played a game for Philadelphia thanks to injury, Hinkie’s first major move came during the 2013 NBA Draft, when he traded All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday to the New Orleans Hornets (now Pelicans) in exchange for that year’s No. 6 overall pick (Nerlens Noel) and a 2014 first-rounder. While Noel may have fit Hinkie’s vision of the kind of prospect he wanted to rebuild the team with, the University of Kentucky big man also had additional “value” to the 76ers because he had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee late in his only college season and subsequently slid down some draft boards because he wouldn’t be available to play in the 2013–14 season. That kind of delay was music to the 76ers’ ears. Not only did they nab an undervalued talent (and collected an additional first-rounder for the following season for their trouble), but Noel’s absence helped ensure that Philadelphia would be very bad in 2013–14, which likely would push its own first-round pick higher in the 2014 draft.

  In that draft, the 76ers doubled down on this gambit, using the No. 3 overall pick on Kansas center Joel Embiid, who had foot and back issues in college and was, like Noel, at risk for missing a large piece of his first pro season. Philadelphia also spun a deal with Orlando with the pick it received from New Orleans, netting an additional second-round pick (more on this aspect of the strategy shortly), and an extra first-rounder down the road. With the twelfth overall pick, the 76ers then took Dario Saric, a two-time European youth player of the year who was not eligible to come to the NBA for two more seasons because of his professional contract in Spain.

  So, over Hinkie’s first two drafts, the 76ers used three of their four lottery selections on players who couldn’t play immediately, two of whom were carrying significant injury risk. All three of those players were downgraded by other teams because of those concerns, but they made them more valuable to Philadelphia, which (a) thought the players had star potential; and (b) wanted to continue to be bad for the short term, in order to rack up even more high lottery picks.

  This was the case again in 2014–15, when the 76ers went 18–64, with a start of the season that was so horrible (they went 0–17 before winning a game) that it launched a number of things:

  • The team itself had head coach Brett Brown regularly meet season ticket holders in pregame forums to take direct questions about the franchise’s plan. (I walked in on one of these before a November 2014 game against the Chicago Bulls.)

  • The NBA brought in team management in December to answer questions about the so-called “tanking” strategy and the integrity of the 76ers’ overall rebuilding plan.

  • Most notably, the NBA also brought to a vote potential changes in the draft lottery system to disincentivize losing as a way of helping a team improve its chances at a top pick.

  That vote, somewhat surprisingly based on sentiments described in pre-vote media reports, fell six yesses short of the required three-quarters needed to flatten out the draft lottery odds. That was, in part, because some teams felt changing rules that quickly midstream would be unjust when there were trades already on the books that included draft pick swaps as far out as 2020, and in part because some understood there was a method behind Hinkie’s madness and that Philadelphia was operating within the rules, even if some found the 76ers’ methods distasteful.

  “I think, in essence, the owners were concerned about unintended consequences,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said after the results of the vote were announced. “I think we all recognize we need to find the right balance between creating the appropriate incentives on one hand for teams to, of course, win, and on the other hand allowing for appropriate rebuilding and the draft to work as it should in which the worst performing teams get the highest picks in the draft.”

  “I don’t necessarily disagree with the way it works now,” Silver added. “I’d say from a personal standpoint, what I’m most concerned about is perception out there right now and frankly the pressure on a lot of our teams, even from their very fans, to somehow underperform because it’s in some peoples’ view the most efficient and quickest way to get better. I think that’s a corrosive perception out there.”

  Despite the draft root of the plan being upheld by franchise owner vote, the 76ers’ strategy prompted a lengthy discussion as to whether the team was willfully warping the competiti
ve spirit of the league for their own projected benefit. As ESPN The Magazine’s Pablo Torre detailed in an excellent February 2015 column looking at the 76ers’ situation, criticism of the team was coming from so many directions that one of its players eventually authored a column debunking the claims.

  From Torre’s feature:

  “If you’re in tanking mode,” Lakers co-owner Jeanie Buss recently told ESPN, throwing shade in Hinkie’s general direction, “I think that’s unforgivable.” SLAM magazine declared the team “a flesh-eating bacteria of sorts on the NBA’s collective self-respect.” The league’s former deputy commissioner, Russ Granik, testified to The New York Times, “I don’t understand this strategy at all.” By November, the national backlash had grown so overwhelming that Philadelphia’s point guard, 23-year-old Michael Carter-Williams, wrote a defiant essay for the Players’ Tribune, Derek Jeter’s online publishing concern, titled “Don’t Talk to Me About Tanking.” “Grown men are going to purposely mail it in for a 1-in-4 shot at drafting somebody who might someday take their job?” Carter-Williams wrote. “Nope.”

  O’Neil insists he roots for the 76ers to win every time they take the floor, even though it was obvious that losing benefited the team in the short term, and that the team was designed to lose games. His position is certainly plausible, because there’s a difference between rooting against your own team and putting a group on the floor that simply isn’t capable of winning very often. The 76ers weren’t dogging games; the team actually played very hard. They just haven’t been very good, by design, in order to forge a better path to get really good somewhere down the road.

  Focusing solely on the losses and the overall strategy, though, made a lot of people miss more subtle signs of growth, along with the potential of the team’s draft, trade, and contract strategies.

  Statistically, the 76ers were the worst offensive team in the league in 2014–15, scoring a paltry 95.5 points per one hundred possessions, according to Basketball-Reference.com. As such, many fans assumed the 76ers had a bad offense, which is not the same thing, and was not true. Even with a really young, inexperienced roster that was shuttling players in and out, Brown was busy installing a modern offensive philosophy that should work as the team’s talent level increases and stabilizes.