The Spurs lost because they’re old.
The Spurs are done.
The Spurs couldn’t match the athleticism of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
All of those statements have been uttered before.
The first two have already been refuted multiple times.
The third is reasonable and fundamentally accurate, but it still doesn’t tell the whole story of another playoff exit suffered by San Antonio at the hands of its neighbors from Oklahoma.
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See that player above, in the cover image for this story? That’s Patty Mills. Two years ago, Mills did this in the NBA Finals:
Mills gave the Spurs exactly what they needed in the 2014 playoffs. In the 2015 first round against the Los Angeles Clippers, Mills wasn’t a bastion of rock-solid consistency, but he substantially contributed to some of the Spurs’ wins. He left enough of an imprint on the series for others to notice, especially since an injured Tony Parker played well below his full physical capacity.
The money-line detail about Patrick “Patty” Mills: He’s 27 years old.
He’s not Manu Ginobili or any player who’s at the end of the line in the league. Parker played a decent series against Oklahoma City — not quite at the level the Spurs needed, but hardly the nothingburger served up by others on the San Antonio roster. Precisely because Parker showed up in this series — at least relative to 2015 against the Clippers — Patty Mills did not have to live up to a longer and more detailed job description. He merely had to do what the Spurs expect him to do: Provide some energy, hit some jump shots, and create instant offense when he’s on the floor, thereby preserving the spacing the Spurs need when they have the ball.
Mills is closer to a young buck than an old man. He was ostensibly called upon to provide the very thing which would have given San Antonio the ingredient it so badly needed against Oklahoma City: perimeter shooting.
He just didn’t perform. More specifically and memorably, he didn’t come close on the corner jumper which could have won Game 2. He stunk.
The story of Patty Mills is the story of a Spurs roster which failed to keep the flame burning this season. That flame is the fire which has enabled San Antonio to unearth welcome production from all sorts of role players. The Spurs have built their reputation on Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, yes, but they’ve also built their name and their towering legacy on the work of R.C. Buford and Gregg Popovich, the men who find hidden gems and turn them into polished products. San Antonio’s uncanny ability to maximize all sorts of odd pieces — surrounding the Duncan-Parker-Manu trio with helpful teammates — enabled the franchise to become the envy of the NBA since Michael Jordan hit that shot in Game 6 in 1998.
This year, those pieces — which created 67 regular season wins — crumbled against the Thunder. Oklahoma City certainly played a role in shaping that process of deterioration, but let it be said that the Spurs did indeed deteriorate.
This wasn’t about age — not when most of the league felt that David West was a good acquisition, and not when Tim Duncan retirement talk really didn’t surface all that much during the regular season.
The Spurs just didn’t play well enough. The Thunder played better. Give the winning team credit, and don’t try to dismiss the losing team’s painful defeat as a biological event more than a basketball event.
Remember: The Spurs have been viewed as old for a long time, but they’ve kept coming back and reinventing themselves, tweaking themselves, making themselves better. In 2012, Oklahoma City ushered them out of the playoffs in six games, and the “old and done” chorus raged into action. This season, the Spurs won 67 games.
Maybe Oklahoma City developed its players and prepared them for the playoffs, while the Spurs — normally the team which achieves that goal — failed to do the same.
Maybe the Spurs once again lacked the knockdown perimeter shooting which — when on, as the 2013 and 2014 Finals showed us — makes them extremely difficult to beat.
Maybe Oklahoma City produced the bench play the Spurs have normally carried into the playoffs over the past several seasons.
Blaming this series outcome on age is a weak take — just like Kevin Martin in Game 6 on Thursday night.
