Leading Off: Spurs, the Throwback Team, Still Dominating

Coach Gregg Popovich talking with
Tim Duncan duringthe Spurs’ Game
2 victory over the Thunder on Tuesday
night.

The proper way to watch the Spurs’ victory in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals was stock-still, jaw slightly agape, eyes following every pinpoint pass, focused on plays so intelligently run it seemed Coach Gregg Popovich had found a way to live-animate his play board. You could almost feel John Wooden beaming all the way from the basketball afterlife. The Thunder, for the most part, worked hard and tried hard and the young star players leaned hard on their natural talent, but they were no match. They ended up looking like the bumpers in a pinball game.

The Spurs provided a mesmerizing look back at old-school basketball, the kind in which teams are built to be more than the sum of their parts. But they’re doing it now, in 2012, with the rest of the N.B.A. having long succumbed to star player fever. San Antonio’s Tony Parker had the kind of magnificent game that would put him in modern highlight heaven — 34 points, 8 assists, nary a false step — and the conversation topic afterward was how much grief Popovich had given him over the years to turn him into this player, as Johnny Ludden writes so compellingly on Yahoo.com. Has any coach given the likes of LeBron James grief? Even for a minute?

So, the Spurs are up, 2-0, heading to Oklahoma City, carrying a 20-game winning streak and prompting writers like J.A. Adande of ESPN.com to wonder if they’ll ever lose. Certainly, they will lose at some point, even if they win the N.B.A. championship. No team has gone undefeated in the playoffs. In a way, they’ve already won, extending their antitrendy style into this era, defying age and time and the desire to be big on YouTube. And the Spurs are anything but boring, as Jen Floyd Engel writes on Foxsports.com, making an art form of their style.

For a prime indicator of the difference between the old-school Spurs and the new-world Thunder, you need not look any further than their coaches. As Buck Harvery writes in The San Antonio Express-News, the Spurs’ success flowed from their dedication to Popovich and his less than dazzling style, while the Thunder’s Scott Brooks has his future resting on the day-to-day success of his star players. Another symbol: Tim Duncan has forever resisted the call of somewhere else, writes Ray Ratto on CBSSports.com, and wisely stayed exactly where he belongs.

For now anyway, you can watch and be amazed.

And then you can flip back over to the modern N.B.A., where the Clippers managed to retain Coach Vinny Del Negro and yet exude exactly no feeling of stability, writes Arash Markazi on ESPN.com. With some far more impressive coaches on the market, the Clippers would have been wise to shoot higher, writes Bill Reiter on Foxsports.com, and the move just means Del Negro will spend another year on a toasty seat.

With that settled, restless sports fans in Los Angeles are free to discover that their only big-league team still playing is the N.H.L.’s Kings, who head into Game 1 of the Stanley Cup finals Wednesday night against the Devils with a chance to introduce themselves to a wider audience. Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times has requested permission to join the bandwagon, which he said looks more like a delivery truck than a parade float. The Devils’ bandwagon contains its hardy, overlooked fans, which have had to console themselves with a bunch of championships in lieu of the attention lavished on New York’s teams. They are a bit braced for the idea that the Rangers could lure away forward Zach Parise, but, Johnette Howard writes on ESPN.com, that is unlikely to happen. The funny thing is, even Devils fans weren’t so sold on these Devils this year, which is why The Star-Ledger of Newark humorously offered to let fans take back the comments they most regret this year.

There was a lot of regret at the French Open on Tuesday, mostly congregated in a puddle of tears around Serena Williams. Her loss in the first round seemed a lot like the beginning of the end, writes Greg Couch on Foxsports.com. It’s not that stars losing in the first round is all that unusual as Chris Chase details on Yahoo but it was the way it happened, with Williams unraveling (starting with this point) and losing her usual air of dominance.

Baseball had some unusual happenings in an otherwise quiet midseason slog, including the Rangers signing Roy Oswalt. He is a long way from his overpowering days, writes John-Jacques Taylor on ESPN.com, but a great addition as a role player in the Rangers rotation. Oswalt enters the scene midseason just as Detroit’s Magglio Ordonez exits, planning his retirement announcement for Sunday, reports The Detroit Free Press. And Cincinnati has an unlikely hero on and off the field, with the rookie Todd Frazier saving a man from choking in a restaurant and doing a bang-up job for his team as well.

A much more sobering baseball story is told by Tom Verducci on SI.com about the real toll the steroids era took on its players.