You know your team is old when adding 36-year-old Pau Gasol also means getting younger.
Without Tim Duncan for the first time in two decades, the San Antonio Spurs find themselves poised to dominate, but age remains their Achilles heel. San Antonio has proven to be timeless, but the question must be asked every year: Are the Spurs finally too old to compete?
Everyone expects the Spurs to rattle off another breathtakingly efficient regular-season campaign, but when it comes time for the postseason, will advanced age finally take its toll?
Big problem on defense
Pairing up two dominant post players like Gasol and LaMarcus Aldridge is a gift, not a curse. In an era of small ball, few teams have the personnel to counter two skilled inside-out 7-footers. They're about to treat the league to a crash course in high-low passing.
But there's one big problem: Neither of them can defend the perimeter, and when it really comes down to it, neither of them are great rim protectors. Summoning David Lee off the bench certainly won't help either.
That's where losing Duncan hurts the most. Sure, Timmy is older than Dr. James Naismith (and probably had the same vertical by the end), but at least Duncan could protect the basket. Without their defensive anchor of 19 years, Gregg Popovich has a big problem on his hands in terms of defense.
For example, how will the Spurs deal with Golden State going small with a Draymond Green-Kevin Durant frontcourt? Those two will drag Gasol and Aldridge out to the perimeter and run circles around them. Or how about LeBron James and Tristan Thompson? Can two thirty-and-over veterans handle that kind of physicality? And it's a wrap if San Antonio's bigs were ever caught on a switch against Kyrie Irving or Stephen Curry.
With how the modern game has gravitated to the perimeter, defense has become an impossible proposition for bigs. There's only a small handful of frontcourt players who can switch on the perimeter and guard the paint. San Antonio's bigs can do neither and that's a big problem.
The old guard
Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili are at the stage in their respective careers where they can drop an efficient 10 points per game with their eyes closed in the regular season. They know the system inside out.
Problems start to arise when the Spurs need more from old guards, namely on defense and in shot creation.
Ginobili can still surprise opponents with his length and quickness for the occasional steal, but he's a 200-pound guard one year away from 40, while Parker has been a defensive liability for almost a decade. They're passable against run-of-the-mill opponents in January, but come time for the playoffs, they'll face the likes of Russell Westbrook and Curry. That's an obvious mismatch.
The Spurs also lack players who can create offense when their sets break down. Parker and Ginobili have taken turns serving the role of shot creator in the past, but neither player is particularly effective in terms of getting to the rim in their advanced ages. They no longer have the ability to consistently break down their man, and that means defenses can get away with staying at home on San Antonio's shooters.
Kawhi as the cure-all
With Duncan gone, the Spurs are officially in the Kawhi Leonard era. San Antonio will go as far as Leonard takes them, and if he takes yet another gigantic leap in his development, Leonard could be the cure-all for San Antonio's problems.
Leonard is a top-10 player who has mastered nearly every aspect of the game. He was recognized as the Defensive Player of the Year for the second straight season, he nailed a whopping 44.3 percent of his 3-point tries, and he was one of four players last year to score more than 21 points per game while shooting over 50 percent from the field.
(The other three: Durant, James, and Curry. Yes, Leonard ranks among the elite scorers in the NBA.)
The only thing that Leonard has yet to completely master is an off-the-dribble game, and even that is coming along nicely. He debuted a lethal mid-range post game a la Kobe Bryant last season to go along with his stellar finishing around the hoop. Now Leonard needs to add the pull-up three to his arsenal (already a stellar 38.7 percent shooter, but attempted less than one per game), and become a better scorer in isolation (where, again, he's already in the 84th percentile).
The muted Leonard has established himself as an elite player, and if he can continue making these all-around improvements at the margins of his game, he could single-handedly carry the Spurs to a title.
