Tim Duncan, Whose Lack of Style Was Style Itself

It took all last month for it to dawn on me that the last NBA season I could remember that did not have Tim Duncan anchoring the Spurs began when I was eight years old.

In basketball, the most individualistic and naked of our major sports, it seems easier for its biggest stars to morph into larger-than-life on-court archetypes.

Michael Jordan was the ruthless conqueror; his performance in the final minutes of the 1998 NBA Finals feels more and more like the sport’s equivalent of a decisive cavalry charge.

Kobe Bryant, the world’s foremost Jordan cover band, took on the role of the angry genius; his treatment of his teammates was not far removed from Stanley Kubrick reducing Shelley Duvall to tears before every take in “The Shining.”

LeBron James comports himself with the savvy and self-aware aloofness of a CEO, and Allen Iverson was an artist whose fury and penchant for self-destruction caused him to burn out years before his time.

Duncan was different.

The Onion spent years running stories about Duncan offering to drive NBA players to polling place on Election Day, or urging his teammates to save up their frequent flier miles. FreeDarko writer Bethlehem Shoals wrote that Duncan was proof that the absence of style can be style in and of itself. It is fascinating that someone can be so obviously and profoundly good at playing basketball while not jumping off the screen.

It has been a long time since I have played organized basketball — my career was made tragically brief by my being short, slow, and near-sighted — but I can still remember our coaches exhorting (progressively louder and more exasperated, I’m sure) us to use the backboard. I probably didn’t listen enough to that advice, but Duncan did.

There are at least two signature Duncan plays that I can recall.

One was in Game 5 of a 2004 playoff series against the Lakers, where Duncan, fading to his left and with Shaquille O’Neal and Karl Malone draped all over him, hits a go-ahead bankshot with four-tenths of a second left in the game. That shot was overshadowed by Derek Fisher’s miraculous split-second heave to win the game. O’Neal, whose outspokenness, brute-force game, and Hollywood-adjacence made him a natural foil to Duncan in the sports-as-moral-battleground world of the sports media, quipped afterwards that “one lucky shot deserves another,” but luck had nothing to do with it. Duncan was blessed with the ability to somehow find the goddamn backboard no matter where he was on the floor.

Then there’s the second signature play, from the final moments of overtime in Game 7 of the 2014 Western Conference Finals. Duncan gets the ball on the low post, blanketed by feared shot blocker Serge Ibaka. He spins baseline to put himself almost perpendicular with the basket, hangs in the air just long enough to lost Ibaka and bank in the eventual game-winner. Even at 38 years old, he was succeeding because he paid attention to those coaches the other chubby seventh-graders wouldn’t (and also, I suppose, because he was seven feet tall and extraordinarily skilled and athletic).

And that — his contributing to a championship team at the age of 39 — is a pretty astonishing thing as well. Duncan’s rookie season began in 1997, with Jordan’s Bulls making their final title defense, and ended with the Golden State Warriors breaking the Bulls’ single-season wins record. He helped bridge the gap through the biggest style change in the NBA since the advent of the three-point line.

Duncan and the Spurs were willing to play the heavy during the first half of his career, where they were the poster children of the slog-it-out, low-post-and-defense era where scoring levels reached critical depths (the 2004 Lakers/Spurs game I mentioned earlier ended with a final score of 74–73). When the NBA relaxed hand-checking rules in the middle of the 2000’s to make things easier for perimeter players to operate, the Spurs once again found themselves as the heel, perpetually knocking the electric Phoenix Suns out of the playoffs; their 2007 NBA Finals sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers had the lowest TV ratings of any Finals ever.

And yet, they adapted. When they went back to the Finals again in 2013 and 2014 (winning the second time) they had become the same kind of creative team they had spent years smothering in the playoffs.

Duncan, in his late 30’s, had reinvented himself into a small-ball center after a career of playing power forward alongside another big man. Unlike his contemporary and Western Conference rival Bryant, who raged against the dying of the light until the very end, Duncan chose to play fewer minutes and concede the offensive load to his teammates. He had aged gracefully.

Until this past spring, when the Spurs lost resoundingly to the Thunder in the second round of the playoffs. Oklahoma City’s faster, younger, stronger athletes pushed the Spurs around in the final three games of the series and largely relegated Duncan to a spectator on the sidelines; for the first time in his career, Duncan couldn’t find a way to hang on the floor. For the first time in his career, he was old.

So it wasn’t all too surprising that he announced his retirement a month ago. It also wasn’t too surprising that the reaction to it was subdued; announcing one’s retirement after the season precludes one from the parting gifts and sentimental ovations in every arena.

More than any of his other contemporaries who have retired or will be retiring soon, we will have a harder time seeing another Duncan in the near future.

After all, it would be difficult to replicate the style of someone who has none.