For Spurs, Wait Game Is the Test

Unbeaten over more than a month, winners of 15 consecutive games, the San Antonio Spurs seem to be peaking at the most opportune time, a cohesive, defensively aggressive unit playing its best basketball just as the NBA playoffs are heating up.

They are, as Coach Hubie Brown of the Memphis Grizzlies described it after the Spurs had swept a first-round series against the spirited but overmatched Grizzlies, “a superior team ... at the height of its game.”

But they are also, for at least until Wednesday, and possibly longer, a team without an opponent. Eventually, they’ll play the Lakers or the Houston Rockets, whose first-round series resumes with Game 5 Wednesday night at Staples Center, but that series could drag on through Monday.

Tim Duncan, Tony Parker & Co. polished off the Grizzlies in Game 4 on Sunday night at the Pyramid, flew home to San Antonio afterward and tried to figure out what to do with themselves the rest of the week.

After two days off, they’ll reconvene Wednesday for practice.

“We’ve had to do it before,” Coach Gregg Popovich said of getting through a long layoff between playoff series. “But it’s a really difficult thing to do.

“We just hope we make the right decisions, between staying fresh and giving them rest. I know that there are a couple guys on the team that could use that. But if it’s at the expense of them being in a rhythm and being sharp and so on and so forth, then it’s a negative. So, we’ll spend some time speaking about it with the players and the coaches and see if we can come up with something that makes sense.

“But it’s certainly not an ideal situation.”

Last year, en route to their second title in five seasons, the Spurs won all four of their playoff series in six games, their longest layoff five days.

In 1999, they had to wait 10 days between a sweep of the Portland Trail Blazers in the Western Conference finals and the opening game of the NBA Finals against the New York Knicks, but they defeated the Knicks in five games.

“Rest never hurts,” Parker said.

The Indiana Pacers and New Jersey Nets, of course, are in the same boat as the Spurs after sweeping their Eastern Conference first-round series, but only the Spurs swept an opponent that had won as many as half its regular-season games.

Their swift elimination of the Grizzlies was as unexpected as it was lopsided, the young and athletic Grizzlies having won a franchise-record 50 games during the regular season, three in four games against the Spurs.

But the Spurs, who haven’t lost since March 23, dominated the series, winning three of the games by 24, 17 and 13 points, and, in the face of a charged atmosphere in Game 3, overcoming a 10-point deficit to win by two.

Duncan averaged 24.3 points and 10 rebounds, making nearly 59% of his shots. Parker averaged 21 points and 8.5 assists, making 53% of his shots, 11 of 16 from beyond the three-point arc. Robert Horry made 61.5% of his shots, averaging 11 points and 8.3 rebounds in 25 minutes.

Rest is their reward, and it was well-earned.

In Game 4 on Sunday, with another towel-waving sellout crowd at the Pyramid urging the Grizzlies to extend their season, the Spurs took control early and led by 10 points or more throughout all but about 90 seconds of the second half, when the Grizzlies twice closed to within nine.

“I thought we came out and matched their intensity,” Popovich said. “It was refreshing to see us come out and try to end it at the start of the game.

“It’s the toughest thing to do, to close out a team, as everybody knows, and if you can get it done, it gives you a lot of confidence. When you give [opponents] hope and they linger, the worm can turn. This is a game; it’s not set in stone. Things can happen; emotions can change. So, it’s always important when you have an opportunity to finish something to try to get it done.”