Classic Tony Parker Emerging as San Antonio Spurs Finally Look Back on Track
Crumple up the obituaries and embrace the inevitable: The San Antonio Spurs are back on track with the NBA's home stretch upon us.
Following a convincing 116-105 victory over the Chicago Bulls Sunday afternoon, the Spurs have won five straight games dating back to Feb. 27. And the driving force behind the last three wins, in particular, is what has San Antonio's stock trending sky-high.
For the first time all season, point guard Tony Parker looks right. After dealing with nagging hamstring injuries, his burst is back, a regular dose of his shots are coming within the restricted area and mid-range jumpers are starting to fall.
On Sunday, Parker positively torched the Bulls by totaling a season-high 32 points (including 15 straight in the third quarter) on 13-of-19 shooting to go with four rebounds, two assists and two steals.
Back to his old, aggressive ways, Parker continually knifed his way to the rim, where seven of his nine conversions were located.
NBA.com provided a complete breakdown of Parker's high-efficiency shot selection:
He was so good, in fact, that Tim Duncan (three points, 0-of-8 shooting) failed to record a made field goal for the first time in his career, according to ESPN Stats & Info, and the Spurs still won by double digits.
Since the Spurs smoked the Sacramento Kings, 112-85, on Mar. 4, Parker has shed the rusty exoskeleton that has been weighing him down all year.
Over his last three games, Parker's averaging 25 points, four assists and two steals per game, while shooting 64.6 percent from the field. Not surprisingly, his shot distribution over that span looks fairly similar to his output on Sunday, per NBA.com:
Determination around the rim is crucial, but as Parker told the San Antonio Express-News' Jeff McDonald, finding some semblance of consistency from mid-range has always been critical to busting out of his injury-induced slump.
"That’s why it’s like … it looks good," Parker said, per McDonald. "It feels good when I shot it. But I miss my first five or six shots, and then you know the defense, waits until I make that shot. Once I make that shot, everything will open up."
And open up it has.
In the midst of a season defined by uncharacteristic mid-range shooting struggles, Parker has hit on 39.0 percent of his attempts between 16 feet and the three-point line, per Basketball-Reference.com.
As a result, defenders have been content to slide under screens, thus forcing Parker to attempt more than 30 percent of his shots from mid-range—up five percent from last season. With his avenues of attack cut off, Parker has attempted a career-low 24.7 percent of his shots within three feet.
For now, that distribution appears to be a thing of the past, and Parker is once again giving defenses major headaches, as Kawhi Leonard told reporters following Sunday's win, according to Project Spurs' Paul Garcia:
Parker has tickled the twine at a 52.6 percent clip during his resurgent stretch, which has allowed him to perfectly balance out his number of mid-range and close-range attempts. Seriously, the distributions from those two spots are identical.
According to ESPN Stats & Info, Parker kicked things into fifth gear and flashed vintage form on drives against the Bulls:
"He entered the game averaging 6.1 points in the paint per game, his fewest since 2001-02, his first NBA season, when he averaged 3.9 per game in the paint and a career-low 9.2 per game overall.
"
Parker scored eight of his paint points on drives. He entered the game scoring 5.3 points per game on drives.
In other words, balance is back and it's breeding brilliance.
Speaking of which, San Antonio's shellacking of Chicago wasn't strictly confined to Parker's dominance.
Leonard scored at least 20 points for the fourth straight game and tied team highs with eight rebounds and three steals. His active hands helped force 20 Bulls turnovers, which led to 35 fast-break points and a 26-point edge in transition scoring for San Antonio.
Head coach Gregg Popovich told reporters following the win that Leonard is the key reason for San Antonio's ability to wreak havoc on the defensive end, according to Garcia:
Toss in 15 points from Patty Mills (his most since Jan. 16) and 16 from the ageless Manu Ginobili in just 25 minutes, and San Antonio is quickly dusting off the formula that has produced championship-caliber results in the past.
"What's unmistakable is that the Spurs seem to be moving faster as a team when the rest of the league is slowing down in these dog days of March," Pounding The Rock's Michael Erler wrote. "The West is brutal and everyone is beating each other up and suffering through injuries, some of them catastrophic ones like Wes Matthews' torn Achilles for Portland."
Now occupying the Western Conference's No. 6 seed, the Spurs are ready to scrap with the Los Angeles Clippers and Dallas Mavericks for mid-level playoff positions that once appeared out of reach. And with 3.5 games separating them from the Dwight Howard-less Houston Rockets, home-court advantage in the first round is anything but a pipe dream.
Just imagine what they'll be able to accomplish once Duncan starts hitting his shots again.
All statistics current as of Mar. 8 and retrieved from Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com unless otherwise noted.
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