Watching David West And Boris Diaw, Gears In San Antonio's Generous Machine

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

To hear most everyone tell it, the current NBA Playoffs series between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder is a contest between systematic precision and rogue athleticism, a conference semifinal by Aesop. The Spurs have been filling their niche since before this Sports Illustrated cover, and the Thunder have grown into theirs over the last few years, transitioning in the public mind from well-coached to poorly-coached to, maybe, uncoachable. The shorthand here is easy to parse, barely coded. "Smart" is the highest praise. "Talent" is a pejorative.

That understanding of things is unfair to both teams, but especially to the Spurs. The downside of their almost two-decade run of title contention has always been a tendency among analysts to credit structure and method over the players that actualize it. Gregg Popovich—who is history's best basketball coach, to my thinking, and certainly one whose accomplishments don't need fluffing—becomes in this context not a partner in San Antonio's success but its sole origin; the most useful quality any Spur can have, star or grunt, is a willingness to oblige him. Nevermind that Popovich himself routinely dismisses this notion, that he tells anyone who will listen that he has been lucky to coach Tim Duncan and Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard, and not the other way around. He's long since been sainted. That redirection of acclaim reads as humility, and his annoyance with the premise as cagey charm.

The Spurs are richly and individually talented, of course, and have been for as long as they've been winning championships. Leonard and LaMarcus Aldridge are much more than regurgitators of Pop's sets; they make plays virtually nobody else in the NBA can. Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili remain effective despite stiffening joints because each has a singular and innate style. Nobody better exemplifies the breadth of ability on San Antonio's roster, though, than a pair of backups. Second-string big men are supposed to be obedient stopgaps, and almost everywhere else in the NBA they are. But in San Antonio, Boris Diaw and David West are still their own selves, to great effect.

Here's a play from a pretty humdrum Spurs game, a mid-March loss in Charlotte. Late in the first quarter, Diaw drove from the top of the key, drew a help defender, and dropped a pass off to West, who made a short hook. That pair of actions was made possible by quiet earlier ones, and it all would have been recognizable as a Spurs sequence even if the faces and jerseys were blurred. Diaw had the chance to drive because his defender was closing out; his defender was closing out because Parker had driven the lane seconds before; Parker had made it to the lane on the strength of a wide-hipped Diaw hand-off. System, system.

Only, look again. Diaw's pass was easy to diagram—the defense rotates, hit the open man—but very hard to pull off. Two Hornets stretched themselves between Diaw and West, and any bounce pass would have had to travel under sneakers or between legs, so Diaw feinted a layup attempt, stretching the ball out on one hand. When the defenders jumped to challenge the shot and drifted just enough, Diaw whisked the pass to West with snap of the wrist so fine it hardly shows up on video. It looks for all the world as if the ball just up and took off on its own, like a dandelion spore on a breezy day. West caught it and finished.

You'd be hard pressed to find two more dissimilar players working so closely together. Diaw, who came to prominence in the middle of the last decade with those Phoenix teams that pushed the old Spurs to six and seven games with fastbreaks and atom-splitting pick-and-rolls, is a born conduit. He shuffles his frame across the court—spindly legs, funny belly—tossing passes that look innocent enough when they leave his hands but prove brilliant when they find their target. West, who last played for those Indiana teams that pushed the Miami Heat to six and seven games in a hail of forearms and elbows, is an endpoint. Built like a boulder, with a run of sagebrush beard lining his chin, he scores from twenty feet and in using a straightforward catalog: elbow jumper, jump hook, up-and-under. He seems somehow to bruise the abdomen of his defender on every play, even when they don't come into contact.

Needless to say, their numbers don't astonish. Diaw averaged six points and two and a half assists this season, West seven points and four rebounds. Both logged fewer minutes than they have in a decade. But over the course of a game, together, they exert a sustained pressure. One might spend three quarters jogging from wing to wing setting screens before coming up with some magic. The other can go a whole evening picking and popping until he shoulders an entire front line aside for a key rebound. They influence as much as they contribute; the other team has to stay vigilant, knowing what they can do.

So far, against the Thunder, they haven't done much. The San Antonio starters pretty well walloped Oklahoma City in Game 1, getting rid of most doubt by midway through the second quarter, and in the hectic second game the bench bigs played only a few minutes. Still, they have offered glimpses of their usefulness. A Diaw backdoor pass that seems almost to curve midair sets off a flare of ball movement ending in a wide open jumper. West picks up an iffy technical and a couple plays later pastes a Thunder shot against the backboard. You start to feel for Oklahoma City in these moments; where most rosters have built-in breaks, the Spurs' has only a couple more tests.

Environment and culture, those words that the men in suits repeat during halftime of Spurs games, do have something to do with all this. Before arriving in San Antonio, Diaw could hardly even muster an impression of his former self with the Suns, loafing around for a historically lousy Charlotte team. He was miscast as a go-to presence on the block, and he had neither much opportunity to fling his gorgeous passes nor many teammates who could do anything with them. The Spurs have been a panacea to for a career that looked about ready to fizzle out.

West, meanwhile, took the steepest pay cut in recent memory last summer to get to San Antonio, forgoing a player option in Indiana and signing with the Spurs for about $10 million less. It's hard to imagine him trying to make that same move to another contender. Entering the season, Cleveland and Oklahoma City were known to have some squabbles, and Golden State looked airtight; San Antonio was the spot for a veteran looking for a good bet.

The allure of the Spurs is not about the chance to be taught by Pop, though. The climate he set in motion and maintains is collaborative, not instructional. More pleasing even than the sight of a well-run San Antonio set, all cuts and timing and shared directives, is seeing the joy of players who all get to do what they do best, ex-MVPs and present-day All-NBAers and last-stop journeymen alike. The Spurs, and Popovich, don't promise to make players better. They promise to make good use of them.