Spurs owner Peter Holt believes Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili want to "play until they die," and Tony Parker expects everyone back next season, but there are still plenty of people out there who believe Duncan and Gregg Popovich should "ride off into the sunset" together - calling it a career with championship No. 5 now in their pockets.
There's a problem with that suggestion.
The concept of Duncan and Popovich riding off into the sunset and retiring together assumes that the pair should take advantage of a rare opportunity for legends to go out on top, which is understandable. But it also assumes, then, that they won't have this opportunity next year, and given everything we've seen from the Spurs over the last 15-plus years, why in God's name would anyone believe that?
The Spurs have never repeated as champions before and expecting any team to win three straight Conference titles given the current state of the historically good West may be asking too much. But if any team can, why not San Antonio?
This is a team coming off a championship season in which they won a league-best 62 games despite Duncan, Parker, Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard missing a combined 52 games and without a single player averaging 30 minutes per game.
This is a team that just dominated the two-time defending champs, who boast the best player in the world, in a Finals series that saw the Spurs outscore the Heat by 70 points over just five games. This is a team coming off a postseason run that saw them notch 12 of their 16 wins by 15 points or more - an NBA record - and saw them shoot over 49 percent from the field and 40 percent from deep over their 23 playoff games. They also scored 112.7 points per 100 possessions during the playoffs and allowed just 101.1 points per 100 possessions after finishing in the top-six for both categories during the regular season.
Essentially, this is a deep team that dominated on both ends of the court all season, and didn't need to rely too heavily on its stars while marching to the No. 1 overall seed.
Unless you consider Matt Bonner critical to San Antonio's success, the only two significant free agents for the Spurs are Boris Diaw and Patty Mills. Diaw's playmaking ability was invaluable to the team during their postseason run, as was Mills' improvement from last season. But the Spurs will have some cap space this summer and you would assume they can convince Diaw to stick around. In Mills' case, if the Australian signs elsewhere, the team can either find a backup point guard with scoring punch on the free agent market, or knowing their development history, can find a suitable replacement from within if Cory Joseph is ready for prime time.
In any event, the core of the Spurs should remain in tact as always, with some cap flexibility to spare for good measure. If Duncan picks up his $10 million player option for 2014-15, if Finals MVP Leonard continues his encouraging progress, and if Popovich returns and continues to manage minutes better than any coach in the Association, does anyone really doubt San Antonio's ability to win 55-plus games again next season and be right back in the championship discussion?
By now, everyone is smart enough or has been proven wrong enough times to stop discussing the closing of the Spurs' championship window from year to year. But hoping for and encouraging Duncan and Popovich to "go out on top" almost seems like a new, nicer way of discussing that supposedly closing window, only it's just as naive.
Conventional wisdom says the Spurs should be among the teams competing for a title again in 2015. So I say forget riding off into the sunset after championship No. 5. Why not see if you can postpone that ride until bagging championship No. 6?
