A farewell to Manu Ginobili

Manu Ginobili is a first ballot Hall-of-Famer who scored under thirteen points a game in eight out of his fourteen seasons. He was a sublime passer who never averaged more than five assists a game, and for his career, under four (3.9). He was a killer from the arc, who shot a solid but unimpressive 37 percent for his career, and an unbelievable, crafty, creative scorer who shot 44.7 percent from the floor. He was, along with Tony Parker, part of the most durable big three in NBA history, part of four of Tim Duncan’s five finals, but surely no member of a “big three” ever played fewer minutes. A career sixth-man, Manu averaged 25.8 minutes per.

There was one year, I think it was 2013, when I swore he was done. His quirky, fastball, have-to-see-it-to-believe-it passes, showed an alarming tendency in the playoffs that year to end up in the hands of someone wearing the wrong jersey — twelve times in the last two games of the seven-game series they lost to Miami. The next year he was a key player in a Finals rematch that was a five-game butt-whooping, on one of the best teams I’ve ever seen play. This year he averaged a whopping 7.5 points a game, but as soon as the Spurs needed him, in this latest series — although they likely needed more than they had, even with a healthy Kawhi — there he was scoring twenty points a game against the best defense in the NBA. It didn’t make sense, but of course he did.

None of it ever made any sense, really. You don’t get players who don’t make it to the league til 25 who keep playing til they’re 39. I look at his numbers, and I honestly think they’re lying to me. My team is the Dallas Mavericks, who met Manu’s Spurs in the playoffs five times, losing three out of five. If the game was ever close, and Manu had the ball, I knew it was going in. If they needed two points to win, I knew he was going to curve through the lane, slower but more gracefully than you could imagine an NBA player being, and lay it up off the glass just as the lights went on. If they needed two, I knew he was hitting from behind the arc. He’s 39-years old, and he is still the 187th-most productive scorer in NBA history, but you’d never guess that if you ever watched him when the Spurs had to score.

Or, really, I should correct myself: none of this would have made sense on any other team. Because that was the secret all along. Manu’s was a career of self-denial, not because of his own limits, but because that was precisely what the perpetually loaded Spurs needed. Without them, he could have been — who knows? I always thought he had a lot of James Harden in his game. But with him, even at 25 minutes a game, the Spurs were the freakin’ Spurs. And that’s the way he liked it, and that’s the way he played. No other team could have done so much, needing so little, and no one could have given what was needed -– and no more — so consistently, so dependably, as Emanuel David Ginobili.

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Manu has faked us out before, but the odds are very good, this time, that Manu Ginobili has played his last NBA game. It came in a series that — after Kawhi’s injury — may have been the first in his entire career when it would have been a huge upset if his team won. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never number among the absolute best players of his era, but that doesn’t matter either. He was a special player, a nearly unique one. More than anything else he was, for his entire career, the perfect fit. I have the feeling he would have been anywhere. But he did it in San Antonio, for a team that’s been better for longer than anyone else in NBA history, and for all the things he did, and most of all for what he was a part of, I’ll always remember him.