Last ride for Big Three?
The year was 2001, and some of the last vestiges of the Spurs' first NBA championship team, crowned two seasons earlier, were already beginning to fade.
Sean Elliott had retired to the broadcast booth. Avery Johnson and Mario Elie, widely regarded as the '99 squad's heart and soul, were gone. David Robinson, a future Hall of Famer, was a year away from joining them.
Worse, the Los Angeles Lakers were in the throes of a three-title mini-dynasty, thrashing the Spurs in their purple-and-gold wake and threatening to decimate the best years of Tim Duncan's prime.
Duncan, a once-in-a-lifetime talent drafted three seasons earlier to salvage a franchise from a perennial state of also-ran, was already at a career crossroads. He was 25 years old.
What happened next changed not only Duncan's life, but the direction of a franchise. In June 2001, weeks after the Lakers had swept them from the Western Conference finals, the Spurs drafted a teenage French point guard prodigy named Tony Parker with the 28th overall pick. A year later, the 57th overall pick from 1999 — a longhaired dervish from Argentina named Manu Ginobili — finally arrived in San Antonio.
The rest is Alamo City history.
Eight seasons, 16 combined All-Star appearances and three shared championships later, Duncan, Ginobili and Parker remain the NBA's most enduring Big Three. No active triplets have been together for as long, or have won as much.
Even after an offseason in which All-Stars LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined forces with fellow All-Star Dwyane Wade in Miami to form the NBA's ultimate power trio, the Spurs' Big Three remains the league's most accomplished.
And yet nothing lasts forever. The Spurs' All-Star troika enters its ninth season together facing perhaps the stiffest test to the union yet. Parker is in the last season of his contract. The final season of Duncan's deal, set to expire after the 2011-12 campaign, could be wiped out by labor unrest.
On the brink of a 2010-11 season that could represent their last ride together, Duncan (34), Ginobili (33) and Parker (2
sat down with Express-News NBA writers Jeff McDonald and Mike Monroe at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston to talk about their past, their championships, their lasting regrets and — above all — the enduring bond of their long-term relationship, eight years in the making:
Let's start in 2001-02. Tim had already won one title, three years earlier. All of a sudden this 19-year-old French kid shows up, replacing Avery Johnson. Tim, what were your initial thoughts about Tony Parker?
TD: “I think it's pretty well documented that I wasn't too sure about what to expect from him. With his age, with his inexperience, with his lack of knowledge of the language ... all those things went into it.