Is the Spurs mystique gone for good? Was it ever real?

For over two decades, the San Antonio Spurs were the most stable franchise in professional sports, and among the most successful as well. Apart from one season in the mid-90’s, when David Robinson only played six games, the Spurs have made the playoffs every season since 1990, and until last season, the Spurs had won 50 games in 18 consecutive seasons — not even the Celtics of the 1950s and 1960s who won 11 championships in 13 years were able to approach that.

The Spurs won titles 15 years apart while led by the same coach and player, which is unprecedented and unlikely to ever be repeated. Imagine if the Warriors won a title in 2030 while still coached by Steve Kerr and led by a 42-yea- old Stephen Curry — that’s the type of longevity we’re talking about

The Spurs have developed such a reputation for stability and success that pretty much any move they make is immediately hailed as subtly brilliant, ahead of the curve, or at the very least, prudent. To a certain degree, this makes sense.

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Over the past few decades, the Spurs have made a number of savvy moves that made them the lasting success they are. Manu Ginobili was drafted No. 57 overall, Danny Green had floundered in Cleveland before the Spurs helped make him their starting shooting guard, and they signed a waived Boris Diaw who had shown very little in his tenure with the Charlotte Bobcats. Every other team could have made these moves — moves that helped determine championships — but no one else had the foresight or audacity that San Antonio seemed to.

What made the Spurs mystique seem so real though is not merely that their front office seemed smarter than every other team’s, but the fact that seemingly ever player is transformed by their presence in San Antonio. Diaw looked like a shell of his former self in Charlotte, a player whose career was coming to a rapid and depressing end, but two years after being signed by the Spurs, his shift to starting center in the final three games of the 2014 NBA Finals was the proverbial nail in the coffin for the Miami Heat. The Spurs decimated them by a combined 57 points in those games.

The Spurs have branded themselves throughout the league as the place to come in order to renew your career, or the team to poach employees from in order to renew your own franchise, with former coaches and executives populating the staffs of seemingly every other team in the league. Kevin Pritchard, Mike Budenholzer, Brett Brown, and Sam Presti are just a few of the more notable Spurs alumni to have found success for other teams following their tenure with the Spurs. The trend shows no signs of abetting as it continued this offseason with the Hornets hiring Spurs assistant James Borrego to lead their team in the coming years.

However, this mystique has faded to. The Spurs have still been one of the better teams in the NBA, appearing like championship contenders as recently as 2017, but the discord with Kawhi Leonard has called much into question. Has the team handled things correctly? Where they wrong to have invested so much in Kawhi in the first place? Had it all been a fraud all along?

Here’s the thing: the Spurs consistent success during the Popovich era was real and unprecedented, but it was also explicable. It was nothing mysterious, nothing that could not, at least theoretically, be replicated elsewhere. It’s not as exciting or ineffable as an actual mystique, but as simple yet also as difficult, as finding good personnel, scouting well, and utilizing players and staff in the best way possible. The Spurs championships was due to a concrete confluence of events that was rare and largely unprecedented, but also, any team with multiple Hall of Famers and one of the greatest coaches in league history is bound to have a great number of success. They were just smart enough, and lucky enough, to put the pieces in place.

The recent drama involving Kawhi Leonard undercuts none of this. His injury, recovery, and subsequent discontent is largely unprecedented in recent NBA history. The Spurs have not handled it flawlessly by any means, but it appears that the relationship was broken irrevocably months ago for reasons that still remain hazy. Kawhi’s mind was made up, and that was that.

Perhaps we projected something onto Kawhi that was never there. We imagined him as the successor to Tim Duncan not only as the Spurs’ leading player, but also in terms of personality. He was seen as the quiet, unobtrusive, easy to deal with star who never needed any special treatment or attention. Really, though, he was just quiet, and in that silence, we created the idea of a player who may not ever have really existed.

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Now is the true test for the franchise. For the first time in Popovich’s tenure as head coach, the team is without a true superstar, a franchise player around whom everything else can orbit (all due respect to DeMar DeRozan). The Spurs find themselves not exactly adrift, but in a more tenuous position than they have in a very long time. The future of the franchise is uncertain. No longer are they championship contenders, but a team that that will be fighting for a playoff spot in the crowded Western Conference. However, if history is any guide, the Spurs are as well equipped to make the best of this situation as any team in the NBA.