To come anywhere close to justifying their ranking as one of the league's preseason favorites to earn yet another NBA championship this season, the San Antonio Spurs know they will need Tim Duncan to be every bit as good as he was last season, when they came within seconds of dethroning eventual champion LeBron James and the Miami Heat.
According to the San Antonio Express, management is preparing for training camp with every confidence that Duncan will be his same ole robotic, reliable and dominant self. Even now at 37, they're confident that Duncan's game, tailored as it is, will again rise to the occasion.
"He's a mentally unique individual in that he's able to sustain the year-round workout regimen, both physically and diet wise," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich told The Express of Duncan,"He has an unbelievable feeling of responsibility for his place in the program and wants to sustain that performance that he brings night after night."
Popovich and others further point out the 17-year veteran's game has always been about savvy and know how and not simply raw athletic ability, the former being traits that are far more transferable even in the latter stages one's career as is this case with Duncan. And according to The Express, they offer the career of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as Exhibit A.
Much like Duncan, Jabbar was never the most athletic player of his era but he was widely considered one of the most durable. What's more, the L.A. Lakers star, playing in his 16th season, actually increased his production at age 37, much like Spurs coaches are hoping Duncan will be able to this season
Just one thing; Jabbar probably never had a summer the depths of which Tim Duncan has just been forced to endure. Duncan and his wife of 12 years, Amy, were officially divorced earlier this summer in a secretive, closed-door session agreed to by a district court judge to keep the media at a distance.
Court records seem to clearly indicate the one-time college sweethearts had truly grown apart over the years, with her hurling accusations of him being gay or bixsexual before the court. Duncan also admitted that he once hired a private investigator to tail her because he believed she might be cheating on him.
According to The Express, Duncan also later sought the court's assistance and authority in having Gilbert R. Urbano Jr., the man reportedly romantically linked to his then-wife, banned from being around the couple's two young children. Still multiple other media outlets reported Amy Duncan even claimed another man actually lived under the same roof as she and Duncan during the first two years of their marriage.
In the face of all the trauma, one has to wonder just how much Duncan's heart will be into it once the Spurs roll out the balls later this month.
For most of the summer, and particularly since the divorce, Duncan has kept a low profile. One of his few public outings came last week when former two-time boxing champ Jesse James Lejia tweeted a photo of a training session he was holding with Duncan captioned "the greatest power forward ever! TD and I after boxing workout for an hour."
Still, Duncan's silence has already resulted in more of his teammates being put in the unenviable position of being asked to speak for him.
Appearing on Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club Radio Show in New York earlier this summer, Spurs teammate Danny Green was asked if he thought his teammate might be gay.
"I definitely haven't suspected anything," Green told hosts. "He's going through some stuff and that's what happens when you go through a divorce. It gets ugly. Timmy is Tim. I'm not going to look at him any differently."
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