Spurs’ Ship Finally Comes In

To San Antonio basketball fans, it was like being told they had shore leave coming--in two years.

Now that 7-foot-1 center David Robinson has finished his two-year stint in the Navy, he can begin earning his $26 million basketball keep. And San Antonio is abuzz over the approach of Robinson’s first regular-season NBA game and the new-look Spurs, who won only 21 games last season.

“They know that there was just all this hype about me. I think especially the people here in San Antonio, and I guess the people around the country, are just curious about how I’m going to be,” Robinson said after a recent team practice.

A little pressure, would you say?

Not really, contends the cool-headed 24-year-old.

“I think because of the guys that we’ve brought in this year, they’re taking a lot of the attention away from me,” Robinson said. “It gives me a chance to really relax a little bit and play my own type of game.”

He’s sharing the load with veterans like Maurice Cheeks and Terry Cummings--acquired in off-season trades with Philadelphia and Milwaukee--and rookie Sean Elliott.

“It would have been very unfair to have the same team as last year and expect David and Sean Elliott to come in and carry us,” Coach Larry Brown said. “There’s no doubt in my mind David will be a great player, I just don’t know when it will happen. I look at Patrick Ewing’s development and I hope David can develop along those lines.”

“I don’t feel the pressure of having to shoot, having to score,” Robinson said.

It’s a switch from the Naval Academy, where as a senior Robinson averaged 28.2 points, 11.8 rebounds and 4.5 blocks and said he “had to be great every night” for the team to win. Between Navy and the Spurs, Robinson was on the U.S. Olympic team, scoring 19 points and grabbing 12 rebounds against the Soviet Union in the gold medal game that America lost.

“He took the Olympic loss personally, so he is anxious to prove himself in the NBA,” Brown said. “But you can’t really say he is rusty, he just hasn’t played a lot. He didn’t realize he could be a good basketball player until he was already in college.”

Though one of the Spurs’ leading scorers in preseason contests, with 17 points against Milwaukee, 22 against both Boston and New York and 29 against Dallas, Robinson warns that too much shouldn’t be read into that.

“The way that I’m going to make this team win is defensively, on the boards. That’s where I’ve got to dominate,” he said. “I need to get 10 or 12 boards a game.”

Robinson isn’t the only Spurs player adjusting to a new role. Only Willie Anderson, Frank Brickowski and Vernon Maxwell remain from last season, when the team finished 21-61, its worst season ever.

Rookie Jens-Uwe Gordon, from Santa Clara, and Zarko Paspalj, playing his first NBA season after three years as a pro in his native Yugoslavia, are part of the team’s new look. And the Spurs acquired David Wingate and Chris Welp in the Cheeks trade with the 76ers and signed free agent Caldwell Jones.

Brown, in his second year with San Antonio, said last summer that he felt his team was too young.

In exhibition games, the Spurs are 4-2, defeating Dallas twice, the Milwaukee Bucks and New York Knicks once and losing to Boston twice.

Brown said he has looked to Boston and players such as Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish as examples and confidence-builders for his young players.

“I told David after the game he ain’t going to play against many guys better than McHale, Parish and Larry Bird,” he said.

Brown, who guided Kansas to a national championship before joining the Spurs, has been trying players at various positions. Elliott and Anderson, for instance, have been tested at guard and forward.

Elliott, the No. 3 overall draft pick from Arizona and Pac-10 scoring record holder with 2,555 career points, signed a five-year, $9 million contract two days before the team’s first preseason game. Though Elliott has been playing catchup, Brown said he isn’t having trouble adjusting to the pros.

“He was terrific against Boston,” Brown said after the first preseason loss. “Right now we’d like to see him play small forward and guard somebody at that position.”

Young players say Cheeks, with the NBA career record in steals, and Cummings, 11th in the NBA in scoring last season, have become team leaders.