Why It's 'Buyer Beware' When Dealing with the San Antonio Spurs
Warning to any NBA team thinking about pursuing a sign-and-trade deal with the San Antonio Spurs for restricted free agent Aron Baynes: Walk away.
Yahoo Sports' Marc Spears tweeted earlier this month (h/t Air Alamo): "The Spurs are open to sign and trade offers for restricted FA C Aron Baynes, who played well for Australia at the World Cup, a source said."
That tweet has since been deleted, but the interest and uncertainty surrounding Baynes persists.
Again, potential Baynes suitors: Just don't do it. You'll regret it later. It's not worth it.
Abort.
That's not a hit on Baynes, the Australian center who played a minimal role for the Spurs last season (but averaged 11.8 points and 10.6 rebounds per 36 minutes, according to Basketball-Reference.com). Nor is it a knock against the rest of the NBA's scouts, who saw the same production and bruising play from Baynes the rest of us did during FIBA play.
His appeal isn't hard to understand.
He's 27, he's got a ring and he's got two years of Gregg Popovich's priceless tutelage on his resume. What's not to like?
Well, for starters, how about dealing with a Spurs outfit that, somehow, always wins the transaction game.
Sure, drafting Tim Duncan got the ball rolling, and Popovich's leadership has been invaluable in San Antonio's nearly 20-year run. But the Spurs have sustained their success by dominating in the draft, making smart signings and getting the most out of virtually every swap they've engaged in.
Basically, San Antonio evaluates talent better than anyone—to the point that any team thinking about a deal with the Spurs should probably assume it's about to get hosed.
The list of smooth Spurs moves is far too long to catalog in its entirety, but a quick glance back over some of the most recent, notable transactions paints a clear picture: It's best to avoid doing business with San Antonio.
Last February, the Spurs sent Nando De Colo to the Toronto Raptors for Austin Daye. De Colo played 21 pretty good games for Toronto, enjoying an increase in his assist percentage that came along with greater ball-handling responsibility. His shooting numbers took a bit of a dive outside of San Antonio's hyper-efficient system, though.
De Colo will play for CSKA Moscow next year, a fair indication of how valuable the Raptors believed him to be going forward.
Daye, though, looks like he may become yet another scrapheap-to-success story for the Spurs. The No. 15 overall pick in 2009, Daye flashed a tantalizing combo of shooting and ball-handling skills during summer league. At 6'11", Daye can do just about anything on a basketball court; he's smooth, polished and a darn good long-range shooter.
His game log from Vegas indicates he'll be, at worst, a very good backup for Kawhi Leonard at small forward this season.
| July 11 vs. SAC | 14 | 9 | 3 | 1 |
| July 13 vs. CLE | 10 | 5 | 2 | 2 |
| July 14 vs. NOP | 18 | 11 | 5 | 2 |
| July 16 vs. MIL | 9 | 4 | 4 | 1 |
| July 17 vs. UTA | 20 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| July 19 vs. WAS | 27 | 7 | 2 | 1 |
| Average | 16.3 | 6.7 | 3.0 | 1.5 |
If you're not willing to trust the long history of San Antonio rehabilitating talented players who've run out of chances elsewhere, or if you view all summer league numbers skeptically, that's fine. There are other examples of San Antonio winning deals.
Take Gary Neal, a guy who scored 24 points in 25 minutes to boost the Spurs in Game 3 of the 2013 NBA Finals, as another test case.
Neal shot 39.7 percent from beyond the arc in three years with the Spurs and was a huge weapon off the bench. He seemed like the kind of high-efficiency gunner any team would want.
In a telling move, though, the Spurs decided they no longer wanted him in 2013. They withdrew their qualifying offer, making him an unrestricted free agent and essentially replacing him with Marco Belinelli, who went on to have, easily, the best season of his career.
If you view that transaction as a Neal-for-Belinelli trade, the Spurs got the best of the bargain. But if you also take into account how Neal declined after signing with the Milwaukee Bucks (and then after being traded to the Charlotte Bobcats), the Spurs' foresight gets another gold star.
Neal (and the Bucks, apparently) thought a bigger role would mean great things. "It was a situation I was looking forward to, coming in here and being a guy they could rely on. It was a bigger role, a (higher) level of importance. As a competitor, you look for those situations and this is the first time in the NBA I've had a situation like this," Neal told reporters upon signing with the Bucks.
The Spurs knew better.
It took a while, but we eventually learned the Spurs knew better in one of their highest-profile swaps in recent memory. At the time, and for quite a while afterward, most viewed the draft-day deal that sent George Hill to the Indiana Pacers for the rights to Kawhi Leonard in 2011 as a wash.
It feels especially unfair to talk about that deal now, as Leonard is fresh off a Finals MVP award and Hill's game fell off a cliff along with the rest of the Pacers last season. But that's what makes this particular trade so fascinating: The Spurs ultimately dominated an exchange that seemed so reasonable when it went down.
If they don't get you now, they'll get you later.
Even as Leonard improved in 2011-12 and 2012-13, Hill was a key starter for the league's best defense. And he made two trips to the Eastern Conference Finals. In the end, though, Leonard has proved to be the vastly superior talent.
And that's exactly what makes dealing with the Spurs doubly unfair.
Even if another team makes a seemingly equitable deal, San Antonio's peerless culture and system of player development tips the scales in its favor eventually. Maybe Leonard would have developed like this elsewhere, but there's no way to know...and it seems pretty unlikely.
Do the Spurs isolate talent more effectively than other teams? Or is their system's capacity to nurture any talent so strong that they don't really have to?
Yes and yes.
It's a combination of both those things. After all, it takes a keen scouting eye (and some guts) to snatch up forgotten castoffs like Boris Diaw and Patty Mills in 2012, or Danny Green in 2011. And if you dig even deeper, you have to also include drafting Manu Ginobili (No. 57 in 1999) and Tony Parker (No. 28 in 2001). But none of those players, talented as they were when acquired, would have developed the same way outside of San Antonio.
True, some have gotten away. Goran Dragic and Luis Scola come to mind, both of whom the Spurs selected late in the second round and allowed to end up elsewhere. But by and large, San Antonio picks great players, either as signees or trade targets, and makes them even better.
Circling back, if there's good news for the rest of the NBA in all this, it's this latest development:
If Baynes winds up in China, at least the Spurs won't get anything back via trade that pushes them out even further ahead of other contenders. They would, though, have an open roster spot—one they'd no doubt fill with yet another terrific talent.
Come on, Yao. You spent almost a decade in the NBA; you should know better than to deal with the Spurs.
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