The San Antonio Spurs winning a late-season game against the Portland Trail Blazers normally wouldn’t be anything of consequence, but their 118-110 victory over the Blazers on Thursday night was actually pretty significant. It was the last win the Spurs needed to have an all-time winning record against every team in the NBA.
The Spurs now sport a .503 (80-79) win percentage against the Blazers, which is obviously their “worst” mark. Their best, by way of Brian Martin of NBA.com, a .774 (123-36) winning percentage against the historically hapless Los Angeles Clippers — who got some measure of revenge in last season’s opening round of the playoffs.
This statistic is just another way of showing how dominant the Spurs have been since the arrival of Tim Duncan. Every other team in the league has had their ebbs and flows, their rise to greatness and fall to misery, but not the Spurs. They are a paragon of excellence and consistency. Every trend, every shift that’s come through the NBA, the Spurs have either squashed or adapted to, such as shedding their plodding offense for an uptempo juggernaut that captured the 2014 title over a decade and a half after Duncan’s first canoodle with the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
There have been flashier teams, like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s Lakers three-peat dominance, and hotter teams, like today’s Golden State Warriors or the Seven Seconds or Less Phoenix Suns, yet none of them can match the Spurs for continued excellence. For that they are, understandably, the envy of the entire league.
(Via NBA.com)
