The San Antonio Spurs laugh at the idea of supercharged trios being considered superteams. A superteam doesn’t just win two out of four chips, blow up the ship after four years, and get trounced in the NBA Finals courtesy of a historic leveling. Superteams dish out historic pummelings (see below), redefine league best practices (no player averaging over 30 Minutes Per, anyone?), and, remember this, do their winning beyond just the free agency.
This incarnation of the Spurs franchise is primed to rock some more heads (and projections) come next season. They’ve stayed intact, bringing on Boris Diaw and Patty Mills, two major contributors that played beyond themselves this past finals and that greatly improved their level of play from 2013’s finals defeat. Kawhi Leonard, one of the youngest Finals MVPs of all time, is choosing to rest his able body this summer. And, of course, they still got the Big Three, and master wizard Gregg Popovich.
As Clippers Coach Doc Rivers rightly put it, “They are the team to beat.” And he’s not just referring to their place as defending champions.
Yes, the West is stacked, but so is this Spurs squad. They’re a superteam, and not just a supertrio, in every sense of the word. The team not only the highest point differential in an NBA Finals ever (+70), they set the highest point differential in a playoff run ever (+214). They logged almost 500 more passes than the Heat did. Their offensive efficiency on the grand stage, 118.5, or, you know, the best we’ve seen since 1980. Mercilessly, they dropped 55 three-pointers on the Heat in five games. And, on top of that (and the list extends as long as Duncan’s resume), they logged the best field goal percentage in finals history at 52.6 percent.
They didn’t just win a championship, they pillaged and plundered for one.
Granted, the Spurs have never repeated a championship run, but we’ve never seen a team of this magnitude before. That’s not to say they’re one of the best squads to ever lace up—a lot would need to be accomplished before that were the case. It’s that, if anyone deserves to be called a superteam, it’s the samurai Spurs. Calling unproven and, by comparison, shallow teams with heaps of potential superteams denigrates the status of actual superteams.
Doc Rivers seems to have not forgotten that a giant still operates in the Lone Star state. Fans and the league would do well in remembering the same. Or, they’ll be in for a rude awakening when the superteams everyone has been drooling over are made to drool by a team that fits the title categorically.
