Matt Moore on Team Building Model

Right before tip, so it probably won't get many views, but this is a good article.

Matt Moore with a nice look at San Antonio's run over the last decade plus. No Hornets mention, but offers an interesting look at everything SAS has done to maintain their culture of winning- including some very good fortune- and how it is impossible to replicate it, but teams should still try to do so.

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The Spurs have been smarter than everyone else, and that intelligence has yielded the necessary supporting characters for Tim Duncan that eveyone else has to go out and buy through free agency or trade. They're just better, and that's the explanation for their longstanding success; the same intelligence that yielded them Ginobili and Parker (and Hill and Leonard and...) is the same intelligence that helps them build with the right role players within the right system. Parker was drafted 28th, Ginobili 57th. You can find role-player veterans who can hit 3s and rebound, can find capable nondescript contributors to fit the system. But finding two vital cogs and spectacular players to go alongside your icon, late in the draft? You just can't do that.

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So no, it's not possible to replicate that. But maybe teams are too easy to give up on that dream. Maybe establishing the kind of culture San Antonio has, which promotes players re-signing under market value, which drafts well in late rounds, which turns unstable territories into advantages, is what they should do. Because as it stands, most of this star accumulation isn't actually paying off the way teams dream. They're winning, but not at championship levels, and they're getting headlines but often for the wrong reasons. And San Antonio? Their only headlines are when they have success.

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