The Once and Future Spurs

If it weren't for the blinding brilliance of the Golden State Warriors, we'd be talking about the San Antonio Spurs. It's a conversation we're used to, just as it's familiar that, through 14 games, the Spurs are tied with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the second-best record in the NBA. As a rule, the Spurs don't command much of the national media spotlight, at least not commensurate to their sustained success; as headlines go, "San Antonio Still Really Good" is not quite clickbait. However exhausted you are with the Spurs being Spursy, though, it's time to pay more attention to this year's team. It won't surprise you maybe, but they're still really good.

San Antonio was supposed to be good this year, but they certainly would have been forgiven for starting slow. The Spurs landed LaMarcus Aldridge as a free agent, hooking the offseason's biggest fish and laying the groundwork for the post-Tim Duncan era we've been expecting to begin each season for the past decade. Aldridge is the most talented free agent the Spurs have signed, maybe ever, and with that addition, plus Kawhi Leonard's full pyrotechnic emergence, there seemed to be change afoot. Promising change, sure, but change comes with bumps. Usually.

Aldridge, for all his talents, is an offensive endpoint, something San Antonio's system has mostly abhorred, and with great success. The Spurs have flourished by hunting for open shots in high-value zones, as opposed to shots for specific players in specific locations. Aldridge is a specific player, specific location type, and his presence meant that adaptation and evolution were on the agenda for both him and the team.

By all appearances, it's still simmering. San Antonio's touches this season are about a tenth of a second shorter; the quality of their shot selection is largely unchanged, as is their pace and the quantity of their player movement. All of which is to say that they've been (wait for it) really good: thus far, they've put together their fourth-best SRS (point differential adjusted for strength of schedule) of the past decade.

The Spurs have adapted their system to their situation, tilting the balance toward Aldridge and Leonard without much change in the stylistic output. There are a few more static post-ups, the occasional stand around and watch someone work, but it has mostly worked. The efficiency has lagged behind their own standard somewhat, which only goes to show how high that standard was: the Spurs still rank seventh in the league, although compared to the league average their offense is the worst it's been since 2008-09, according to Basketball-Reference. This hasn't slowed them down any because, relative to the league average, their defense is the best it's been since 2003-04. It's also the best defense in the league this season. To reiterate: still really good.

With the additions of Aldridge and David West, San Antonio's roster has been tweaked slightly bigger. So far, Aldridge has played more than 70 percent of his minutes alongside either Duncan or West. These big lineups have driven the defense—they're smothering teams at the rim, without fouling, and they have been cleaning up the defensive glass as well as anyone in the league. What they've done to opposing scorers could easily be confused for a movie franchise reboot, with Leonard playing the Bruce Bowen character, West and Aldridge as Malik Rose and Robert Horry, and Tim Duncan reprising his role as the Master of Space and Time.

That defensive brilliance will be helpful in the postseason, and has given San Antonio some cover in the present for their ongoing offensive tinkering. Even with Aldridge working to find his spots and Danny Green shooting less than 30 percent on three-pointers, the Spurs are still one of the most efficient offenses in the league. It helps that Leonard has played like a legitimate MVP candidate, of course, if one still standing in Stephen Curry's shadow, but the Spurs are managing this real-time transition astonishingly well.

And it is happening. While the minutes for Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili continue to decline, their effectiveness has not. Ginobili is having perhaps his best season ever, which is saying a lot. Parker has looked surprisingly competent, and is probably giggling in the locker room about the rope-a-dope he pulled on everyone with a disastrously bad performance for Team France this summer. Duncan is a human GIF: pure understated brilliance on a six-second loop.

For a long time, I've pictured the Spurs as an Industrial Revolution machine: a seamless assemblage of gears and belts, all spotless chrome, all of them interchangeable yet distinctive. If anything, this season has revealed that San Antonio is a far more advanced machine. They are like some T-1000, liquid metal monstrosity, taking a wrecking ball to the face and fluidly reforming and repairing the damage. Rube Goldberg is way out of his league here.

We're still in the first full month of the season and there are plenty of tests ahead—the Spurs don't play either the Cavaliers or the Warriors until the middle of January—but Popovich will probably do his passive aggressive act and just pick C for every answer on those tests anyway. These first few weeks were supposed to be where San Antonio fumbled and stumbled and struggled like mortals.

Sorry. Maybe that will happen in 2016, or maybe never at all. These are definitely not the same old Spurs. They're figuring out what they're going to be, all while winning like the team they were. It doesn't look like news, admittedly, but the Spurs are still really good, in a way they haven't been good before.