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Tim Duncan's lasting impact beyond 'The Big Fundamental'
Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE via Getty Images

Tim Duncan's lasting impact beyond 'The Big Fundamental'

[Editor's note: This article was originally written in July 2016 shortly after Tim Duncan announced his retirement]

July is the time of year resigned for the future. 

The NBA’s draft was less than 30 days ago; free agency has shuffled the league’s deck and the Summer League is in full swing. The future is fun because it’s an abstraction. It’s perpetually a step ahead with infinite endurance. You can chase the next moment, the next trade, the next idea, the next season – but tomorrow only becomes a reality once you’ve lived it, and the next tomorrow is right in front of you with endless possibility. No matter the strength of our imagination, none of our physical senses can interact with the creative constructs engineered by our minds. We can make assumptions based on the aggregate data of our lived experiences and learnings of trends, but they’re merely a thesis that we have no way of proving even with the most advanced research capabilities. It’s what makes thinking about tomorrow so interesting; it’s what makes thinking about tomorrow so futile. But there’s also a futility about the past because this is where Tim Duncan exists, and will exist for the rest of our basketball-watching lives.

This much we know: we’ll never watch Duncan play basketball again – at least not in real time. Duncan's role now is to inspire a sense of nostalgia that moves through the NBA’s most fascinating stylistic transition. When Duncan entered the league, he was drafted to serve as a stand-in for the towering archetype that allowed every non-Michael Jordan led team to success over the previous two decades. “You can’t teach height,” they’d tell you in the mid-to-late-90s all the way through the early aughts – and Duncan stood there at 7-foot tall, the perfect specimen to place in the paint along side the recovering-from-injury David Robinson.

What made Duncan such a coveted ball player out of Wake Forest is that he had all the tools you could teach, too. If you ever wanted proof that there was a deity watching over the NBA, sitting in the rafters of your arena of choice, deciding who matters and when, you’d have to look no further than Duncan, basketball’s true Chosen One. Never before have we seen a man so pure on the 94x50-foot canvass where the most beautiful art in athletics is made. We didn’t always appreciate the aesthetic of a picture-perfect 15-footer slicing off the glass and through the hoop, but his technique knew no peers. We may not have appreciated the grace of 7-footer having feet like a man 18 fewer inches in stature or the eclectus-esque touch around the rim or the defensive timing that forced us, many times over, to wonder if he were manufactured by Jaeger-LeCoultre. The Big Fundamental is what we called him, but it’s such a reductive nickname. Duncan wasn’t just successful because of his nature of doing things by the book, he was successful because his meticulous attention to detail allowed him mold his game to whatever form the culture of the league dictated.

Duncan won titles on Spurs teams that played among the slowest paces and the fastest. He won titles in a post-dominated NBA and this new league played on the perimeter – and he won titles as the transition was happening. Many who followed Duncan’s career will suggest a man of his stature is a relic, a throwback from a different time, but Duncan was as modern as any man 19 years into the league could be. Aided by Gregg Popovich, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, the Spurs had as much to do with the league’s transition from the dull back-to-the-basket dominated offenses to the current ideologies stemming from advanced analytics. The 2016 Golden State Warriors are the most fully realized version of what the NBA currently wants to be, but the 2014 Spurs brought an aesthetic to this style that we will never see again.

Positional fluidity has been a driving force in modern team building, but it’s been an ideological fluidity that allowed the Spurs to win at a 71 percent clip over the last 19 years. And more importantly, it was Duncan’s allowance of this constantly fluctuating paradigm shift in style and the development of the NBA’s most recognized culture. Duncan didn’t necessarily create the Spurs culture as we know it, but the culture was built around his ability to find resolve in the new. If a franchise’s biggest star is resistant to change, the franchise isn’t able to innovate – and innovation more than anything else defined a nearly two-decade long epoch in San Antonio. Duncan’s legacy won’t go down as just the greatest power forward to ever play the game, but as the face as the most innovative, most consistent, and winningest franchise during his era. Duncan wasn’t just The Big Fundamental; he was fundamentally the most important big man of the new millennium.

Basketball is different today than it was at the beginning of this week. A huge piece of what drove this league has been taken from us. There were signs of the news’ imminence, but it still hurts to lose someone so important even though we know that he’s still there. It’s easy to want to trust that things will be the same, but they can’t, and they won’t, not without Duncan. His public-facing stoicism is how many of us have come to define his humanity over the years, but we’ve always known deep down that there was so much more to him than his personality let on. Without basketball, we’ll have to discover what that more is as we always do when stories of the game’s greats start trickling down in books and documentaries – and there will be books and documentaries because no city quite loves their superstar like San Antonio loves Duncan. We’ll move forward without him, though, because Duncan the basketball player is no longer a part of our future.

Tim Duncan is gone. It’s a sudden reality that is hard to come to terms with after the retirement of any of the NBA’s luminaries. YouTube will allow us to go back to the scenes of his grandest gestures and lowest moments. Even with the unforgettable, we’ll always need reminders. Memories are as fickle as title hopes, and Duncan gave both to San Antonio more times than any one fan base could ever ask for. Tim Duncan wasn’t just the Spurs, he was basketball, and for that, we should all feel a sense of loss as his absence leaves a Texas-sized hole that the NBA can never fill. But we should all feel a since of pride to have lived through a once in a league’s history type of player. There will never be another Duncan, and there will never be another era quite what his Spurs put together.

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