Manu Ginobili Is Still Here, For However Much Longer

Aesthetically speaking, Manu Ginobili stopped being a reason to watch the San Antonio Spurs some time ago.

He's still there, of course, insofar as he wears the same jersey, and his face contorts into the same gleaming smile, and his hairline remains comfortably sparse. He continues to take the court for 20-ish minutes a night, a totem of San Antonio's original Big Three era. We can see him, we can watch him, we can remember.

One of the subplots from last year's secretly devastating Spurs team was how deceiving age could be. Even diminished, Tim Duncan approximated his best unlike any 40-year-old since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Thirty-three-year-old Tony Parker, on the other hand, abruptly withered, not necessarily before his time—this is what happens to legs that have been squeezed and pressed for every drop since age 19—but jarring nevertheless.

Ginobili, despite taking on the most peripheral role, is the one who is closest to where he should be, gliding along in a sort of venerable competency. He posted his best three-point shooting year in ages last season (39.1 percent) but was just reasonably efficient shooting overall (45.3 percent), while his turnover numbers (1.7 per game) weren't all that far removed from the days he was playing 10 more minutes a night. Once among the game's pyrotechnic wing scorers, Ginobili cracked 20 points just three times last season. In the playoffs, he broke double digits once. You cannot count on him to produce night in, night out anymore and San Antonio doesn't; the one-time fourth quarter ace is now Danny Green's backup. But he's still useful enough to play for reasons that transcend brief moments of nostalgia.

The matter at hand is how long he can keep doing this, as well as how long he wants to. The league's heroes of the last decade are departing en masse, and doing so in rather predictable fashion. Duncan ghosted away, exactly how everyone expected. Kobe Bryant telegraphed his exit, then wrung every drop of goodwill he could from it. Kevin Garnett's retirement was halting in its timing, but the larger outcome was obvious to anyone who watched him glumly shuffle through two-plus years of irrelevance. Paul Pierce has already announced he will call time on his career after the season, while it's generally assumed that Dirk Nowitzki will soldier on for one more year.

There's far less clarity with Ginobili. After weathering a series of nagging injuries while appearing in 70 games in 2014-2015, he was disenchanted enough to publicly declare that he was likely finished at season's end. He proceeded to suffer an even more significant injury, play fewer games and average career lows across the board, only to proclaim himself rejuvenated. "It wasn't that hard to decide to keep on playing," he recently told NBA.com's Fran Blinebury. He used words like "happy" and "blast" and "enthusiasm" to describe his current state of mind. He's content to play year to year at this point, and so it's anyone's guess how long this lasts—'this' being his health, effectiveness, and desire—or parts of all three.

Which is rather fitting. Ginobili was always San Antonio's wildcard. It wasn't just that he did things in a hurry, but that he eschewed predictability while doing so. Why should it be any different on the way out, whenever and however it comes?

There always seems to be an imperative to pay attention to certain athletes in their waning hours, an insistence that everyone must binge watch as much as they can before the final buzzer blares. However valid it may be, that call has not and may never come for Ginobili. The most watchable player of the Spurs dynasty was also the least accomplished in terms of resume, and so he has never been cast as an individual attraction the way Duncan or even Parker have been. A Ginobili retirement won't carry as much weight as a Bryant or Garnett or Pierce or Nowitzki exit.

And yet, there's something to Ginobili that sets him apart. He'll end where he started, and do so having mastered the transition from star to supporting act like few of his contemporaries. It's a credit to how well one game's most unorthodox players has adapted to the role of a conventional bench player. It has never felt awkward to watch him marry his dwindling game to a reduced status, something that Gregg Popovich facilitated but has been carried out only because Ginobili embraced it. Just this offseason, he could have decamped for Philadelphia to play Resident Adult In The Room and, the Sixers backcourt being what it is, probably start, too. Instead, he stayed, to do a little less until there's nothing left to give.

Whether or not that's worth tuning in for is a matter of personal choice. There's not much appointment viewing in five minute bursts as a spot-up shooter, or those drives into the lane that now sputter out. But he won't be around much longer, in this form or any other, and that bears some kind of mentioning. And somewhere along the way, there will probably be a few last flecks of magic, too. Manu Ginobili was many things, but he was never boring.