With appropriate credit given to the real beautiful game, futbol, basketball can come really close. The 2014 champion Spurs exhausted the Miami Heat from ball movement. Total demoralization. With hoops, when we talk about beautiful basketball there is a consensus that you’re thinking of ball movement, hard working defenses, and a general commitment towards the team rather than the self. Coach Pop’s Spurs have gone thru several iterations as he masterfully adjusts his team’s gameplans towards his players’ skill sets, while maintaining core principles. This year, in one of the toughest top to bottom conferences the NBA has ever seen, the Spurs are battling not only for the playoffs, but for relevance. A team full of midrange dinosaurs will not become three point marksmen, and Pop realizes this. Their talent level would easily be good enough for a mid level playoff team in the East, but the West is overloaded with hungry teams who simply may be better than what the Spurs can offer, we’ll see.

Pop laments the loss of beauty in basketball, while ESPN unbelievably equates the rapid decline of Carmelo Anthony and his playstyle to Pop’s displeasure at the current state of the game. Each iteration of the NBA has strengths and weaknesses, with “old school” being harder in today’s market with lower scoring and unappealing brutality, legal and illegal. Today’s game is far more exciting to some, while the illegality of defense and general lack of grit is mourned by old heads. This shift towards an almost unrecognizable version of the NBA goes hand in hand with the advances in power gained by individual players.

Commitment to team, much smaller contracts, and bigoted owners profiting was the general course of the NBA, a course where leaving your team to join a different contender was not only asinine, but out of the player’s hands at all. With the rise in power for the individual, not only as a marketing starlet but getting what he’s worth on the open market, there is less stability and commitment towards franchises. Rebuilding is a card shuffling of draft picks and contracts while stars gravitate towards optimal situations to market themselves and win elusive rings. The NBA of today is not entirely selfish, analytics favor ball movement, but the humor at a Tom Thibodeau for wanting to “stick with his guys” comes from the outdated nature of the notion.

Popovich’s claims probably stem from an inability to crack the playoff floor in the west along with perhaps a tiring of his trade. He may best one of the best coaches in the history of basketball, and he’s proven his ability to navigate and strategize his way through an evolving NBA. Our current iteration is seeing crazy levels of scoring not only from a focus on analytics that favor layups and threes, but from rule changes that make playing defense next to impossible. Players like James Harden and Demar Derozan have spent hours quite literally plotting different ways to draw fouls. The free flowing, tough minded, grind it out games are mostly behind us. There’s a happy medium between these games and the slugfests of old that can be found if you’re lucky, but you cannot have this version of the game without the rise in power of the individual.

No one should argue against these guys capitalizing on their worth and being able to make decisions for themselves in a market which used to be much harder to navigate (outside of the concept of athletes making this much money in the first place). It’d just be nice if a balance could be found with players recognizing and leveraging their abilities with franchises standing behind those players and building teams, not revolving doors hoping to strike lucky. Teams should look towards the Spurs, and many of the great organizations and how they used continuity in coaching and players to achieving their lasting success. Oh yeah, and maybe we should let guys play defense again, just a thought.