NBA Betting

History of the NBA Finals

2002-2003

It was the third quarter of Game 5 of the NBA Finals, and his coach, Spurs roughneck Gregg Popovich, was unhappy with Parker's uninspired 2-for-6 shooting and was -- ahem -- reminding Parker that he probably should be playing better. Thing is, moments like this tend to bring out the Air Force background in Popovich, adding a ten-hut! air of authority to his tone, a tinge of redness to his face and a whole lot of volume to his voice. Parker silently absorbed the onslaught.

"We're going to make a book of Popovich-Parker speeches that I'm going to give to him to read over the summertime," Popovich says. "Lord knows what the hell I told him."

Of course, Parker probably does not know, either. The prodigy from France may be the Spurs' second-leading scorer and the team's best player after MVP power forward Tim Duncan, but at the same time, Parker often bears the brunt of Popovich's temper. He has done it through his eventful two years in the league, in good times (which have been very good) and in bad (which have been very bad).

"We've got a relationship a little bit like a father and son," Parker says. "He's very hard on me. He's always screaming on me. Sometimes he's kind of crazy; he hurts my ear, he screams so hard. He just keeps screaming and screaming -- you do something good, and he's still screaming."

Certainly, mid-June is no time for mollycoddling, and even as Popovich and his counterpart, Nets head coach Byron Scott, were trying to guide their clubs through the gantlet of The Finals, they were forced to take teaching breaks for the long-term health of their oh-so-young teams.

When you're handling a group of players built around Duncan and a veteran frontcourt but driven by a backcourt of the 21-year-old Parker, third-year point guard Speedy Claxton, third-year shooting guard Stephen Jackson and rookie Manu Ginobili, screaming is a must. And as the Spurs plodded past the Nets to a 4-2 triumph in The Finals -- using a 19-0 run late in Game 6 to come from behind and finish the job -- the timely shout was the best teaching tool available.

The result of such youth and naivete, on the part of both teams, was a Finals that had folks other than just Popovich screaming in agony. Pretty basketball and skilled players were in short supply, and viewers found more exciting things to watch ("What do you think, honey, NBA Finals or more reruns of The Pretender?").

Seven of the 17 regulars in this series had three years or fewer in the NBA, the kind of callowness foreign to a league that has been, at championship time, dominated by veteran teams such as the Lakers this decade, the Bulls in the 1990s and the Lakers and Celtics in the 1980s. Inexperience often led to ineptitude and had NBA great and ABC analyst Bill Walton, in the halls of the Nets' Continental Airlines Arena at halftime of Game 5, wondering, "Where has the shooting gone? Can't anyone make a shot anymore?"

No matter how poor the shooting, though, no matter how ugly the series, the inscription on the Larry O'Brien trophy won't be changed, and there will be no asterisks in the record book. This is the Spurs' championship, and they won't be giving it back.

Still, this year's finalists seemed to be vying for the accidental championship, with injuries to stars Dirk Nowitzki of Dallas and Chris Webber of Sacramento -- and even, to a lesser extent, Rick Fox of the Lakers -- having paved the way for the coronation of a team that was not quite ready to be a champion.

Certainly, the series left the impression (or maybe the hope) that these were not the best two teams in the league. Good teams, sure, with the potential to remain atop their conferences for years to come. But for 2003, with so many of their most significant cogs so green, the Nets and Spurs put together a series only an amnesiac could love.

"It's not pretty," says second-year Nets center Jason Collins. "But it's still The Finals. And we're here, no matter if it's ugly or what."

After Game 3, Popovich observed, "We have set offensive basketball back about 15 years." To that, Coach, we say: if only. Fifteen years ago, in the finale of the 1988 Finals, the Lakers beat the Pistons, 108-105.

The Spurs and Nets would have needed five periods, sometimes six, to get to that score in this Finals. Go back 50 years, Coach, when the Knicks lost to the Lakers -- the Minneapolis Lakers -- in the Finals finale, 91-84, and you'll be in the ballpark.

The litany of offenses to offense committed by the Spurs and the Nets is long. In Game 4, New Jersey managed a 77-76 win despite putting up 11 points in the third quarter and enduring a 7-minute scoring drought, reflecting a series with enough dry spells to shame the Sahara.

The teams set a Finals record for lowest-scoring half by going into the break at 33-30 in Game 3, and the Nets added another record by bumbling their way to nine points in the second quarter of that game. The Nets and Spurs failed to reach 20 points in 19 of 48 combined quarters in the series.

New Jersey scored 492 points; the second-lowest in a six-game series in Finals history had been 520 points. The Nets shot a measly 37.0 percent, just above the 35.5 percent record low set by the Celtics in 1958.

Not that the Spurs were much better -- they shot 43.1 percent. Speaking in Boston after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the New England Sports Museum, Celtics Hall of Famer Tom Heinsohn said of Games 3 and 4, "That was the worst display of offensive basketball I have ever seen." Ouch.

Of course, the coaches in the series spin things differently -- it was the great defense on both sides, not offensive bungling, that kept scoring low.

"Might as well get used to it," Nets coach Byron Scott said midway through The Finals. "It's going to be a defensive battle; it's going to be low-scoring, and you're not talking about teams that can't score. You're just talking about two teams that just compete on the defensive end."

Maybe so. Over the last two years, the Spurs and Nets have been excellent defensive teams. The Spurs are particularly effective at keeping opponents out of transition -- a strength of the Nets and a tool they had used to score 21.8 fast-break points per game in sweeping through the previous two rounds -- because they send four players back on defense once their shot goes up.

It was clear from the beginning of The Finals that between the Spurs' fast-break defense and the Nets' fast-break offense, defense would prevail. The Nets averaged just 15.5 points from their fast break.

Well-laid defensive plans aside, there has been much hand-wringing in recent years about the decline of shooting in the league, and these Finals could be used as Exhibit A in the case of the disappearing jump shot. The defenses adjusted accordingly, making things even uglier.

Popovich says he detests zone defenses, but with the Nets unable to make perimeter shots, he put the Spurs into a zone more in The Finals than he had all season, clogging the middle and forcing the Nets to shoot. They couldn't.

"If they can't make shots," Jackson says, "then they don't want to see us in a zone. It just makes sense to use it then."

The shooting woes are, in part, attributable to the youth on both sides -- guys like the Spurs' Jackson, who hit three crucial 3-point shots in the 19-0 run, and Parker and the Nets' Richard Jefferson and Kenyon Martin figure to get more consistent with their shots as they get older.

But what does it say about a league where players who have not had enough years to develop the basic skill of a jumper are playing key roles in The Finals? It's nice to have young players serve as the future of the league, but it's not very nice when those players are forced to be the present, too. Series like this one are an offshoot of an NBA that is getting ever younger.

"I've seen a dramatic lowering of the number of guys who can really shoot that midrange shot," says retiring center David Robinson, who was a rookie in 1989-90. "When I first came in, there was a lot of guys who could make shots, open shots, from about 17 feet-make them on the move. Now, it seems like there are a lot more extreme guys, either guys who can stand there and shoot 3s or guys who can get to the rim, but not many guys who are really good in-between shooters.

"I think, a little bit, some of the more fundamental skills are lacking in a large percentage of the players."

Claxton smiles at the memory of it, watching NBA games when he was a kid, seeing scores in the triple digits on both sides of the dash. might be nice to get back to that kind of basketball.

"It's a lot more fun to play that way," he says. "But this is what we have, so, you have to work with it. We have built up a good defensive team, and we take advantage of that. As long as we keep winning, you can't argue with that."

Both teams have the youth and talent to keep winning for a long time. The Nets are set, provided they can lock down their pieces - namely, Kidd -- and allow Jefferson and Martin to blossom.

On the other side, the Spurs have the capability to build even more this summer. The Spurs' centerpiece is Duncan, who had 21 points, 20 rebounds, 10 assists and eight blocks in the game that clinched the championship.

In addition, the team's roster is the envy of the league. Including Duncan, it's made up of eight free agents and four returnees -- Malik Rose, Bruce Bowen, Ginobili and Parker, who will be paid a combined $25 million next season. The team will have about $17 million to spend on outside free agents, the continuation of a plan hatched five years ago, before the Spurs' championship in 1999.

The idea has been to keep Duncan alongside another star player - until now, that has been Robinson -- and allow the team the flexibility to bring in cheap, overlooked and underrated talent.

In that sense, the likes of Parker, Ginobili and Jackson are part of a lineage extending back to previous Spurs reclamation projects Avery Johnson, Jaren Jackson, Terry Porter and Mario Elie. For the first time since Duncan and Robinson were matched in 1997-98, the Spurs will spend the summer not looking through the free-agent scrap heap for talent but through the free-agent A-list for that second star player to pair with Duncan.

"It's a little bit different for us," says San Antonio general manager R.C. Buford. "This is something we have planned on for years now, and we have been very fortunate in the years in between, getting Tony Parker and Manu and Stephen Jackson. You can make plans, but you need to have things break right for you, too. We had been looking toward this summer for a long time, and we knew it was going to be an important time in building a championship team. But we certainly did not expect to be in The Finals just before it happened. We have been lucky, to be honest."

Lucky, true, as the Nets were in becoming East champs the past two years. Kidd fell into their laps thanks to a trade with the Suns, after all. But, also like the Spurs, New Jersey was forward-thinking. The Nets made a wise trade by landing Jefferson and Collins for Eddie Griffin two years ago, and they still have the rights to promising teenager Nenad Krstic of Serbia-Montenegro.

For their part, the Spurs long have kept their eyes on this summer as their time to really complete a championship team. "It doesn't happen in one season," Popovich says. "In January, February, I told our local guys we are going to be a lot better the next year or year after."

So will the Nets, most likely, meaning that this year's accidental champions, in the future, could defend their title against their accidental rivals.

Let's hope things get a little prettier next time around.