Back in Atlanta, as the San Antonio Spurs pick-and-rolled their way to another NBA Finals, Michael Cooper was a content man. It made little difference to him that he was being shuffled farther to the back of history’s closet.
In March, San Antonio’s Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili put up their 491st regular-season victory together, moving into second place all-time for any trio of teammates (well behind only Boston’s Larry Bird-Kevin McHale-Robert Parish). By the time the Western Conference Finals were done, the Spurs troika had amassed its 113th postseason victory and moved to the top of that niche record.
They will be attempting to add to that cache beginning tonight at home in a Finals re-match with the Miami Heat.
The trio they passed in both cases came from Los Angeles in the 1980s, when Jack Nicholson ruled and Dyan Cannon glowed: Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and, yes, Michael Cooper, now the coach of your Atlanta Dream.
The way Cooper viewed it, any opportunity to mention those Showtime Lakers was a bonus, even if it was as a footnote to another team’s glory. “We’re still talking points,” he said with a smile.
Besides, he said, “If there was any group to do it, that’s a great group to do it.”
None of his current Dream players would know Cooper as a player at all were it not for some combination of Google and ESPN Classic. He was the splinter thin 6-5 swing man who spent much of his 11 seasons in L.A. above the rim. His ability to guard almost any dimension of player earned a first-team spot on the NBA All-Defensive team five times. His Dream players are more likely to relate to him as the coach who took the L.A. Sparks to WNBA titles in 2001 and ’02.
The trio of players he is more concerned about today is Angel McCoughtry, Erika de Souza and Sancho Lyttle. They make up the heart of a Dream team that has been to three of the past four WNBA Finals but has not quite cleared that last hurdle. Cooper was hired this year to make that happen.
But that doesn’t mean Cooper has no time to watch the NBA finally run out of postseason. This, after all, used to be his time of year before his calendar got turned upside down in the summertime WNBA. He won five rings with the Lakers from 1980-88.
The Heat, of course, has its own threesome of players who have fashioned Miami’s Instant Dynasty — LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
Maybe they will stay together long enough to join the really classic cores in NBA history. Hard to say with contracts expiring and legs aging. For now, though, it is the Spurs’ trio, intact since 2002, that has come to define stability in the most fluid workplace. “That means there’s a lot of longevity there, guys there playing for a purpose, guys playing for championships. And when you do that, special things happen over the course of those runs,” Cooper said.
It’s the Spurs — even if they did eclipse his ensemble in one regard (they are still a couple championships behind) — that Cooper find most appealing. Boring, you say? Not if you are a basketball purist.
“There are not many teams I enjoy watching during the season, but I enjoy watching a team coached by (Gregg) Popovich. Because they play the game the way it’s supposed to be played — five players executing with one common goal,” he said.
It’s the Spurs and their longtime coach Popovich who Cooper finds himself watching as a garage band might watch Springsteen. Ideas grow wherever San Antonio plays. How does Popovich get guys open; what does he run in out-of-bounds plays after a timeout; how does he kick start a team during the inevitable lulls?
And yes, it’s the Spurs and their Jurassic trio that Cooper thinks can win this Finals series. Should have won it last year, he said, until their Game Six meltdown, the Heat grabbing a vital offensive rebound at the end with Duncan on the San Antonio bench.
“If anybody can beat the Heat, they can,” Cooper said. “They have an extra zest behind them knowing they should have been the champions last year.”
“Spurs in six,” he proclaimed. And he sounded quite pleased, even if that means they grow their historic postseason victory total by four more games before the month is out.
About the Author
