Ready for a SPURS win tonight in Game 6 and an NBA Title. GO SPURS GO!
There is a six-man link to the SPURS. The team is named after the hometown of one of the initial investors, B. J. "Red" McCombs, who was born in SPUR, TEXAS in 1927.
The Spurs are 12-1 in playoff series when they are up 3-2. I remember the solitary loss, in 1979, soon after I moved to San Antonio ... went to a couple of those playoff games in the old Hemisfair Arena ...
http://www.expressnews.com/sports/colum ... 605631.php
Spurs may be staring at basketball karma again
Mike Monroe
NBA/Spurs reporter/columnist
San Antonio Express News, June 18, 2013
MIAMI — Thirteen previous times in franchise history, the Spurs have taken a 3-2 lead in a best-of-7 playoff series.
Twelve times, they have emerged with a series victory.
The lone failure is a sad bit of franchise lore, a loss to the Washington Bullets in the 1979 Eastern Conference finals.
Eastern Conference? That's no typo. When the Spurs were taken into the NBA in the merger with the ABA in 1976, they spent their first three seasons in the East.
Doug Moe was in his second season as coach in 1979. George Gervin averaged 29.6 points, winning a second straight NBA scoring title. Massive Billy Paultz, “The Whopper,” manned the middle, a setter of great screens and a solid rebounder. Forward Larry Kenon averaged 22.1 points and 9.8 rebounds.
Those Spurs averaged 119.3 points per game.
The defending NBA champion Bullets had home-court advantage, but the Spurs split the first two games in Landover, Md., then won both games at HemisFair Arena. Gervin scored 42 points in the Game 4 win that put the Spurs up 3-1.
After that Game 4, Bullets coach Dick Motta co-opted a witticism the late Express-News columnist and KENS-TV commentator Dan Cook had uttered the previous season, when the Spurs had trailed 3-1 in a first-round series against the Bullets: “The opera isn't over 'til the fat lady sings,” Motta said, shamelessly stealing Cook's line.
Motta's Bullets won three straight to advance to a second straight NBA Finals.
To this day, Moe seethes at the memory of some of the calls that went against Paultz and Gervin late in Game 7 — a 107-105 loss on the Bullets' home court. His team, he believed, then and now, had the series unfairly snatched from their grasp.
Since then, no Spurs team ever has blown a 3-2 lead in any playoff series.
Could it be basketball karma?