Today marks the end of an era. The San Antonio Spurs have been leading the way as an organisation for two decades, winning five championships in the last twenty years. They last missed the playoffs in 1996–97 (the infamous tank year for Tim Duncan) and last season snapped a mind-boggling 18-year streak of 50+ winning seasons.

That all doesn’t happen by accident and Gregg Popovich has sat at the helm for the lot of it, maintaining his team’s success through multiple incarnations. His coaching genius is well acknowledged. He’s a three-time Coach of the Year after all and could probably have three times that number. He’s supported ably by a front office that gets things done and a team culture that prioritises all the right things, constantly turning over impressive role players. But the main focus of the basketball has been the big three of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Tim Duncan retired a couple years back but Kawhi Leonard had succeeded him as the next reluctant but indomitable face of the franchise.

Well, some things have happened this past offseason. Most dramatic was Kawhi Leonard forcing his way out of the Spurs after his relationship with the team soured beyond repair. He was supposed to be the next Tim Duncan, he was supposed to win championships in San Antonio for years to come. Instead he’s now hanging out in Toronto. The next thing that happened was free agent Tony Parker decided it was time for a change and signed a two-year deal with the Charlotte Hornets. Seventeen years with the Spurs but no longer.

Then, in the early hours of this morning, this happened…

16 seasons in the NBA after being picked 57th overall in 1999, Argentina’s greatest ever basketballer waiting three more years before his NBA debut. He would play 1057 games, 26,859 minutes, scoring 14,043 points. Sixth Man of the Year in 2007-08. A two-time All Star. He also won an Olympic gold medal in 2004 and was a Euro League MVP. The numbers and the accolades are incredible.

But the impact of Manu Ginobili goes way beyond the stats and medals. These days stashing high-upside international players is a common thing but back in the day that was far from the case. There wasn’t much risk taking him so low in the draft but there was plenty of risk in bringing him over in 2002 and giving the bloke a prominent role from the outset – playing more than twenty minutes per game as a rookie. He was a star in Europe already by then but, again, at the turn of the millennium that was absolutely no guarantee – definitely not in the eyes of the experts. And if teams are more comfortable in going with guys of that ilk today then it’s thanks to the path paved by Manu Ginobili these last seventeen years.

Ginobili was never a premier athlete, he never even looked like one. Yet his production lasted well past his receding hairline. But Manu was as ruthless as they ever came on a basketball court, a man who would never in his life shy away from a difficult game, especially not in the playoffs. Sometimes it didn’t happen for him. Plenty more times it did and it wasn’t just that he did it but it was how he did it. The vision of the man. The absolute control in the moment. The way he’d glide to the rim with the ball in hand, helping turn the eurostep into a move seen commonly on every basketball court on the planet. Don’t fall for the pump-fake either, mate. Too late. Manu’s gonna get ya, one way or another.

And then there’s his selflessness. In his last season in the league he notably called out Kawhi Leonard for withholding himself from of the lineup when his team needed him. A bit rough, perhaps, but think about it from Manu’s point of view. He came off the bench in nearly three-quarters of his NBA games because it was always about the team first, how he could help the team. Most people as good as him don’t go that way (Carmelo Anthony ain’t sacrificing no bench role aged 34 but Manu was doing it since before he turned 30). It’s actually hard to underestimate both his impact on the way the game is played and his influence on what it takes to win. Safe to say that none of that was lost on his fellow players.

So now here we are a little way out from the 2018-19 season and the San Antonio Spurs will not have Tim Duncan or Kawhi Leonard or Tony Parker or Manu Ginobili. Even Danny Green is gone too. Gregg Popovich has no intentions of tanking so late in his own coaching career and he shouldn’t have to either, not with the likes of LaMarcus Aldridge, DeMar DeRozan, Rudy Gay and Dejounte Murray around, but it’ll be a funky looking Spurs team. A very different looking Spurs team. A slow and old-fashioned, defence-first looking Spurs team.

They’ll probably still win 50 games though, just because they always do. People have been predicting the end of the Spurs since the dinosaurs died out… or at least since David Robinson retired. But nobody’s got it right quite yet.

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