San Antonio Spurs Drop the Mic on 2015 Free Agency with David West Signing

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Are you kidding me, Gregg Popovich? The San Antonio Spurs won't stop digging, and somehow, they keep striking gold.

Turner Sports' David Aldridge reported Monday that the Spurs weren't done when they agreed to terms with LaMarcus Aldridge over the holiday weekend:

West and the Spurs had been in discussions for a few days before West agreed to sign, according to Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski.

The former Indiana Pacers forward will slot into the San Antonio bench to help turn the team's frontcourt rotation into one of the NBA's best, if not the overall most dominant. Tim Duncan is planning to return and will head back into his starting center position. According to Wojnarowski, Aldridge, meanwhile, just agreed to a max contract over the weekend and will start at power forward. And let's not forget about Boris Diaw.

West in the West? That's horrifying for the rest.

The Spurs lost in the first round of the playoffs during one of the most competitive first-round series in recent history. The Los Angeles Clippers barely outplayed them in a Game 7 which saw Chris Paul bank in a game-winner to send L.A. to the second round. But the Spurs were playing with a banged-up Tony Parker and injury-hampered Tiago Splitter, who has since headed off to the Atlanta Hawks to make room for Aldridge, according to ESPN.com's Brian Windhorst.

Imagine how the Spurs could dominate with a full year of this roster, especially since Duncan has been chugging an unlimited supply of Michael's Secret Stuff for the past 20 years.

West saw his numbers and production fall in Indiana during 2014-15, but that's only natural for a 12-year vet who will be 35 years old at the start of next season. He's hardly ineffective; he's just not the All-Star-caliber power forward he was with the New Orleans Hornets and during his early years with the Pacers.

But that's not the role he has to play in San Antonio. Far from it.

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No one accentuates positives and shields flaws like Popovich, and West's best traits are some of the most Spursian (minimum) money can buy.

He sets hard, stable and, most importantly for the Spurs, active screens. On top of that, he's one of the most accurate mid-range shooters in the league.

As the NBA becomes more and more analytics-driven, you're seeing fewer and fewer mid-range shots, the least efficient attempt in basketball. But there are exceptions to that rule. There are guys who are so efficient from mid-range that you don't mind when they take uncontested 17-footers.

West is one of those guys.

He's actually shot better than 50 percent from 16 feet out to the three-point line during each of the past two seasons, and that's inside the Pacers' scrunched offense which lacks much of the space the Spurs promote inside their schemes.

It will be harder for defenses to guard a West pick-and-pop with Parker as the ball-handler than with Pacers point guard George Hill, who mostly looks to score instead of distribute on such plays.

The Spurs have so many options now that West's minutes will go down (because who plays heavy minutes on the Spurs?), and his numbers will decrease with them. But his actual production will likely soar through the roof.

That stuff tends to happen inside the NBA's best organization, a franchise which continues to pick up quality player after quality player despite maintaining normal sleeping habits.

In the end, the remarkable part of this signing isn't that the Spurs keep bringing in these tremendous players. It's the way they're doing it.

According to ESPN's Chris Broussard, Danny Green took a four-year, $45 million contract inside a market that saw Iman Shumpert, a similarly-styled player who no one would argue is in Green's league, get four years, $40 million, according to Wojnarowski.

Tim Duncan is bound to take a pay cut once again so that he can return to San Antonio. Same goes for Manu Ginobili.

Then there's West, who has become the most extreme example of the Spurs' salary brilliance. The man declined a player option which would have been worth $12.6 million and wanted to come to the Spurs so badly that he agreed to a minimum deal, basically an $11 million paycut.

Is this the most extreme example ever of a player leaving money on the table to ditch his previous team and go after a ring in his waning years?

That sort of stuff doesn't happen in the NBA...actually, I guess it does. But just in San Antonio.

Follow Fred Katz on Twitter at @FredKatz.

All statistics are current as of July 6 and are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com unless noted otherwise.