What will it take for the San Antonio Spurs to repeat as NBA champions?

The San Antonio Spurs are defending NBA champions, but do they have what it takes to repeat and control possession of their crown?

If there’s anything definitive we can say in the world of sports, it would probably be this: there is nothing more difficult, more tiresome, more gruesome or altogether challenging than defending a championship.

Sure, getting the first one is tough. But often teams fall blindly face-first into a championship. Sustaining a championship level of play is the true challenge for a franchise. No organization in modern sport is better than the San Antonio Spurs at maintaining that level of success, year in and year out.

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Only one team in American professional sports even begins to rival the Spurs’ consistency—Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots, who just won their first Super Bowl since 2004. Interestingly, the Spurs, too, had a drought between championships between the 2006-2007 season last year.

Like the Patriots, throughout that period of drought, their core remained mostly intact, while the front office worked diligently to add younger talent for the future. This combination of actions has helped ensure the Spurs are title contenders each and every year. This isn’t a strategy that always works though, as the Spurs had a heartbreaking loss in the NBA Finals in 2012-13 and had been bounced out of the postseason in consecutive seasons before that, dating back to their last title in 2006-07.

The Spurs were literally a defensive rebound away from winning the 2012-13 NBA Finals in six games. But the fundamentally sound Spurs forgot to box out on one play when Chris Bosh secured the offensive rebound of his life and kicked the ball out to the NBA’s best shooter since Reggie Miller — Ray Allen.

The Heat went on to win in overtime and closed out the series the next game. But there was silver lining to the loss, as not only were the Spurs motivated to avenge the loss the next season, but a youngster named Kawahi Leonard used Game 7 that year as the launching point to a season in 2013-14 that ended with NBA Finals MVP honors.

Leonard became the heart and soul of the Spurs title run in the 2014 NBA Finals, hitting clutch shots, making life difficult for LeBron James defensively. He was the rightful MVP of last year’s finals, but each and every Spur contributed.

That in a nutshell is what it means to play for the Spurs. That identity has not been lost this season as they aim to defend their title, it’s just been challenged—and it’s been challenged by two teams in particular.

Those two teams are, of course, the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks.

In many ways, Golden State and Atlanta are mirror images of the Spurs. While the NFL is often called a “copycat league”, the same is true of the NBA, especially this season. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise either, given that both head coaches have roots in the Gregg Popovich coaching tree.

Steve Kerr finished his career with the Spurs, which just so happened to coincide with the beginning of the Popovich era in San Antonio. It’s pretty well recognized that he is still friendly with his former coach, and clearly admires him and his philosophies.

Why are people still talking about the Spurs as though they stand a chance against younger carbon copies of themselves?

Meanwhile, Atlanta coach Mike Budenholzer spent close to 20 years as an assistant to Popovich, absorbing every drop of coaching genius from his mentor.

In the regular season, we’ve seen those teams mostly dominate the NBA with a whirling pace, outstanding unselfish offense combined with marksman shooting (especially from the outside) and in-your-face defense.

For Atlanta, the Hawks have fully embraced the team aspect of what Popovich teaches —which is the reason that ultimately Budenholzer deserves NBA Coach of the Year. He has taken guys who aren’t studs on their own and gelled them together to form the best team in basketball.

Kerr has done a lot of the same in Oakland. Draymond Green fits the Kawhi Leonard role well, and Andrew Bogut is a better version of Tiago Splitter on the defensive end. Klay Thompson and Danny Green are essentially the same player, though Thompson is obviously more explosive.

And then there’s the leading candidate for NBA MVP, Steph Curry, who stars in the Tony Parker role. Because of that nucleus, the Warriors entered Thursday night’s games with an .824 winning percentage and an outside shot at matching the 1971-72 Lakers and 1996-97 Bulls for the second best record of all-time with 69 wins and just 13 losses—they’d of course have to remain perfect through the season’s final eight games (including Thursday night’s completed action).

Theses two teams seem destined to meet in the NBA Finals — so why are people still talking about the Spurs as though they stand a chance against younger carbon copies of themselves?

San Antonio is far from a perfect basketball team. However, Popovich’s squad is as much in the running for another Finals run as any team in the league, despite the injury woes they’ve suffered all season long.

Backup point guard Patty Mills missed the season’s first few months after suffering an injury in the offseason. Kawhi Leonard has only played in 57 of the Spurs’ 74 games. Tony Parker, 61. Manu Ginobili, 63. Most surprisingly in the games played department, Tim Duncan has played in 70 of the Spurs’ games this season. He also leads the team in PER (player efficiency rating) at 22.0.

Leonard, though, is barely behind him at an equally impressive 21.5.

The young Spurs star now leads the Spurs in scoring, at 16.1 points per contest. Perhaps most impressive is the line Leonard displayed in March. Often noted as a great defensive player, Leonard has boosted his offense by 3.3 points per game in 2014-15, despite shooting the lowest percentage from beyond the arc at just 33.7 percent (he’s a 36.6 percent shooter from deep for his career).

In addition to his offense, Leonard knows that it makes sense analytically — and practically — to prevent shooters from taking the three, but he and the Spurs are yet to adapt entirely to this new offensive philosophy.

For the season, Leonard shoots 46.6 percent from 10-16 feet and 42.1 percent from 16 out to the 3-point line. Of course, when you look at just the month of March, Leonard, along with teammate Tony Parker—the Spurs’ other outstanding midrange jump shooter—has been even better.

Here's a shot chart for Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard since March 1st. Shooting 16 foot layups. pic.twitter.com/zNJYfkxiI8
— Synergy Basketball (@SynergySST) April 1, 2015

It’s no coincidence the way those two stars—the two younger stars among the Spurs’ “big four”—that the Spurs ended the month of March with the second best record, 12-3, to only the other-worldly Warriors.

The Spurs, under Popovich, have never worried much about what position they occupied at the end of the regular season, only that they’re still playing once the latter half of April is upon us. In some ways, it’s too bad. If Pops’ Spurs had played all season the way they did in March, they may have made a run at the Warriors’ No. 1 spot in the West.

But there’s another possible angle here as well.

The Warriors look like the obvious team to beat in the West — and they are. But the Spurs are sitting in sixth place, only two games behind No. 2 seed Memphis. Just imagine, if the teams ahead of them collapse, San Antonio easily ends the season as the No. 2 seed despite what they’ve been through.

Should this scenario play out, they would not have to face the Warriors until the Conference Finals. Have fun finding a better postseason matchup than Spurs-Warriors in 2015. Both teams love to share the ball offensively, are loaded with shooting, play great defense and can protect the rim.

Set the excitement meter on a gagillion and watch it explode. If those two teams brought it the way they both brought it in March (and the Warriors really all season long), that could go down as one of the great series of all time.

The road to the championship always goes through San Antonio

And the crazy thing is that as amazing as the Warriors are, in that matchup the “X-Factor” might be Mr. Fundamental, Tim Duncan. If Kerr were to elect to put Andrew Bogut on Duncan, the Spurs’ most efficient player, it would mostly keep him (Bogut) from hanging around the basket to dissuade the penetration of Tony Parker and company.

Plus, in that case you’d have a cross match, whereby Tiago Splitter is defended by someone significantly smaller. And most likely it would be Harrison Barnes who gains that matchup, not Draymond Green, as he’d be required on the Spurs’ breakout offensive talent, Leonard.

Of course, the matchups going the other way are not so crystal clear either. The point, though, is that the Spurs match up well against the Warriors, much better in fact than most teams in the league. The Spurs are one of just two teams in the league to win inside Oracle Arena this season—the Bulls being the other.

If the Spurs do get by the Warriors, they have to be the favorite against either Atlanta or Cleveland. They just beat the Heat last year, which happens to be essentially the same team they’d be facing in the Cavaliers. If they get the Atlanta Hawks, San Antonio would be facing a mirror image of themselves — but a flawed one in comparison.

Besides, the road to the championship always goes through San Antonio. Any team that wants to be crowned champions in 2015 ought to beat the Spurs anyway.

The way they’re playing now, good luck with that.

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