San Antonio Spurs: 7 Reasons Spurs Are Better Than Last Year's Version

After finishing last season with a 61-21 record—best in the Western Conference—the San Antonio Spurs melted down.

They became just the fourth team in NBA history to lose to a No. 8 seed.

This year’s team has a lot of the same parts with a few tweaks here and there.

The 2011-12 Spurs look much more like a championship contender than the ’10-11 version that stumbled through the last three weeks of the regular season and then quickly exited the playoffs.

There are many reasons why this year’s Spurs team will advance further into the playoffs than last year’s team. Here they are.

Balanced Scoring

Ten players on the San Antonio Spurs average 8.9 points per game or more while with the Spurs this season: Tony Parker, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Patty Mills, Gary Neal, DeJuan Blair, Tiago Splitter, Danny Green and Stephen Jackson.

Last year’s team had six players who hit that number.

Ginobili, Mills and Jackson haven’t played a whole lot of games for the Spurs between them, but the fact remains San Antonio is a deep team.

Anyone on this roster can come into the game and put points on the board.

That is further accentuated by the way this Spurs team passes the ball. It starts with point guard Tony Parker—one of the best passers in the league. From there the ball moves with great fluidity around the floor until someone—anyone—finds an open shot.

That makes this team incredibly difficult to defend.

Tony Parker

Tony Parker quietly put up one of the best seasons of any point guard in the NBA this year.

Only Chris Paul, Derrick Rose and Russell Westbrook had higher PERs than Parker. Rose did so while missing 27 games, making him less valuable because he was not on the court often.

This year continued the transition of the Spurs away from Duncan’s team and even marked a change from being a "Big Three" team. Now, the Spurs belong to Parker.

He averaged career highs in points (18.3) and assists (7.7) per game. He did so with superior speed, a lightning-quick first step and the uncanny ability to thread a basketball through any tight space to find a teammate for an easy bucket.

Roster Moves

San Antonio’s front office made some deft moves not only in the offseason, but during the season as well.

Kawhi Leonard has been a great fit for this team as a rookie out of San Diego State. The youngster averaged almost eight points and more than five rebounds in only 24 minutes per game.

He has been undaunted by the jump from mid-major NCAA school to sometimes starting for the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference.

Replacing 30-year-old Richard Jefferson with a rejuvenated Boris Diaw and a seemingly at-ease Stephen Jackson bolstered the roster midway through the season.

Diaw has been surprisingly productive and Jackson surprisingly devoid of negative headlines.

Patty Mills

Also added to the San Antonio roster this season was Patty Mills.

Mills hasn’t seen a ton of minutes as Tony Parker’s backup point guard. But when he has, he has made the most of them.

Mills erupted for 20 points in his third game with the Spurs and followed up with a 14-point performance the next game.

In the team’s final two games, Mills went off. He started with a 27-point outing. Then in the season finale, he finished with 34 points and 12 assists while the San Antonio regulars were resting for the postseason.

Those numbers don’t tell the whole story to Mills’ influence on the team.

The towel-waving Aussie is always the first off the bench to greet teammates during timeouts. He is always engaged in the game, usually on his feet cheering and providing the team with energy.

Lockout

Entering the season, nobody was quite sure what sort of effect the lockout would have on teams.

Popular opinion was teams with a young core group of players who have been together for a couple seasons would be best cut out for the rigors of a condensed schedule. Teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat.

While both of those teams have had success in the regular season, it’s the aged roster of the San Antonio Spurs that finished the season tied with the Chicago Bulls for the NBA’s best record.

Because guys like Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili have played together for so long and had so much success, missing training camp was a non-issue. Players new to the team respect the amount of success that trio has had and were quick to adhere to the team’s norms.

The condensed schedule did not have negative consequences on the Spurs’ aging bodies. That’s because of the creativity of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.

Gregg Popovich

The two-time NBA Coach of the Year earned that distinction this year.

One might think a 16-year veteran like Gregg Popovich would be set in his ways. Instead, Pop showed creativity and a willingness to deviate off course this season.

Down the stretch, as the Spurs were entrenched in a battle for the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference as well as the NBA’s best overall record, Popovich kept his focus on the bigger prize—an NBA title.

He became perhaps the first coach to ever rule a player out of a game because of age.

Not only that, Popovich gave himself time off to rest in the last two games as his star players were sitting out.

Losing Motivates

Last year, as Spurs fans would rather forget, San Antonio became just the fourth No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 8 seed in the NBA playoffs.

You can bet that didn’t sit well with veterans Tim Duncan and Tony Parker over the course of the offseason.

Not a day went by when the players on this team weren’t reminded of the frustration they felt after losing to the Memphis Grizzlies.

That motivated them to work out even harder in the offseason. As a result, Duncan entered his 15th NBA season in phenomenal shape.

Parker continued to blossom into one of the best point guards in the league.

There was simply no way this group would allow itself to suffer the same fate a second straight season.