Most people believe that Manuginobili's path to the Basketball Hall of Fame is one of the least likely things in the history of the sport. With the 57th pick, he was the penultimate player selected in 1999 and didn't make his NBA debut until three seasons later, when he was 25 years old. During his 16-year NBA career — all for the City's San Antonio Spurs — he made more than 700 off-the-bench appearances in 1,057 professional games.
However, as a Hall of Famer, Ginobili was an easy choice, so much so that he entered the first round of voting. He is one of the most successful international players in the entire history of the sport. He won the Europa League championship and four championships in the NBA and led Argentina to a legendary gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics. Still, his lasting impact goes far beyond that.
Rough diamonds
The current Spurs CEO, Bouford, was just promoted from chief scout to scouting director in the summer of 1997. His first job in the role was to compete in the Men's FIBA World Championships under the age of 22 in Australia, which was discontinued in 2005.
Earlier that summer, the Spurs selected Tim Duncan with the first pick, and although Buford didn't know it at the time, the Melbourne trip would change the Spurs' basketball fate forever.
While few other NBA teams have examined the game, Buford saw Ginobili, then 22, first-hand.
"He's passionate and competitive," Buford told ESPN about his first impressions of future Hall of Famers. 'Argentina went into the medal round and it was their best result at the time.'
Greg Popovich, who was Spurs general manager at the time, recalled a similar reaction when he first watched the Argentine players.
"The first time I saw him in the race, he was probably the most fearless competitor I've seen in a long time," Popovich told ESPN. "He has a thin body, a heart and a different drive than the rest of the people on the pitch."
Ginobili averaged 10.9 points and 1.5 assists for Argentina in the tournament and scored a team-high 20 points in the team's semi-final defeat to Australia.
Two years later, Ginobili played professionally in Italy, where he helped lead Viola Reggio Calabria from The Second Division to the First Division. Meanwhile, the Spurs just won their first NBA championship and have no reason to keep their first-round pick, the 29th pick. The team's intention was to bring back the entire championship-winning lineup, so San Antonio traded the draft pick to the Dallas Mavericks.
Buford said: "We don't want to select anyone we've been forced to play. ”
The Spurs selected Ginobili with the 57th pick in the second round. But let him spend at least two more seasons in Italy.
While the Spurs waited, Ginobili played for coach Etoile Messina in Italy.
"Obviously, over time, he performed well in Europe and won the title with Coach Messina," Popovich said.
In Italy, Messina occupied the front row and Ginobili quickly became the most dominant star in European basketball.
"In 2000-2001, we traded him and he immediately became the starter," Messina told ESPN. By the end of the year, he was the MVP of the Europa League final and the Italian league. We took care of all the races. ”
Messina said that early in his European career, Ginobili was a blunt, attacking flank of the basket, but in Bologna, "he improved his jump shot ability, improved his ability to see empty teammates when he was in possession, and started to realize where the best shooters were positioned when he used blocking." ”
'He's starting to understand the value of possession in high-pressure matches like the Europa League and the Italian final.
He shined at the 2002 FIBA World Championship in Indianapolis, leading Argentina to a stunning victory over the United States in the second round. It was the first time the U.S. team had lost while using an NBA player.
"We gave a lot of team hope," Ginobili said at the time. "America is no longer the best in the world... I think they're definitely not happy. ”
His NBA debut is still more than a month away, but it's clear that Ginobili is heading for greatness. Immediately after he joined the Spurs that fall, he entered Popovich's rotation, averaging 20.7 minutes per game as a rookie that would bring the Spurs a second NBA championship.
Ginobili proved to be one of the biggest foreign players in draft history, and he became the champion with the 57th pick, forcing NBA management to rethink how they look for foreign players and use their draft picks.
"If we knew he was that good," Buford said with a laugh, "we would take him with the 29th pick." ”
The greatest of the Golden Generation
Two years after winning the silver medal in Indianapolis, Ginobili took Argentina one step further at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
In the semifinals, Ginobili ignited an American team of Duncan, Aaron Iverson, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, scoring 29 points to lead Argentina to an 89-81 victory. He contributed six assists in the final, where Argentina beat Italy 84-69 to win the Olympic title for the first time. Ginobili ended the game with an average of 19.3 points per game – fourth of all players, behind Hall of Famers Paul Gasol and Yao Ming, and New Zealand's Phil Jones.
"He's part of a team that's changing the way the world looks at the game," Buford said. ”
Manu Ginobili helped Argentina shock the U.S. team and the world at the 2004 Olympics.
While most Americans continue to see that game as a fiasco, the rest of the world sees it as proof of concept on how to beat team USA. Just 12 years after dream teams stormed international competitions in Barcelona, Ginobili and his Argentine teammates proved that basketball no longer belongs only to the United States.
Ginobili and Argentina's golden generation of players including Luis Scola, Fabriccio Obetto and Pepe Sanchez not only helped popularize basketball on the soil of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, they also propelled their national team to one of the biggest victories in entire history. Motion.
Not many players can claim to be the best basketball players ever played on their home continent, but make no mistake, Ginobili is undoubtedly the greatest basketball player in South America, and Oberto says Ginobili's success has opened the door to many other players on his continent.
"He's the best advertisement for a South American player," Alberto told ESPN. "Manu showed the NBA what we can do and that opened the door for many of us to sign."
Since NBA players were first admitted to the Olympics in 1992, Argentina remained the only team to win a gold medal in 2004 other than for the United States.
European pioneer
After Ginobili announced his retirement in 2018, LeBron James tweeted a congratulatory message to him, adding: "Thank you for the game of basketball, because basketball is now the 'European step', the most important step in the history of basketball!!!!
Ginobili didn't invent the European step, and he wasn't even the first NBA player in the league to use it, but he made it famous — and now it's the foundation of today's superstars.
"He changed the style," Popovich said, "and a lot of what he did, everybody in America started to follow suit." "Bringing Europe into the NBA is technically so superb that early in Ginobili's NBA career, league officials have struggled to determine its legitimacy.
The move is intended to maximize the value of the two steps that athletes are legally allowed to take — it goes straight to the brink of a step violation without committing one. European step users basically need two big hops; One takes one path, the next takes a different path. The first jump is something that defenders often try to defend and then jump back in the other direction either to create a clean basket look or to make enough contact with a swinging defender to produce a shooting foul.
"He wasn't the first to use it," Buford said, "but he was the first to use it skillfully." It just reached a level that no one had ever seen. ”
Great Lithuanian player Salunas Machulione is often credited with introducing European footwork to the NBA in the 1990s, but former Spurs Brent Barry said it was Ginobili who pushed European footwork to new heights in the early 2000s as he became part of the key San Antonio dynasty.
"I played a lot of balls with Sarunas and he did that in the game, but he's a more compact, more powerful player," Barry told ESPN. “
Ginobili, who is 6 feet 6 inches tall, is an incredible athlete who uses his body size and feel to use his innovative choreography in the left-handed lane before snaking through the big man on his way to the basket.
"Obviously, as a left-hander, it also catches your eye," Barry said, "and he has the ability that Sarunas doesn't have, which can be done with a finger roll or dunk at the top, or he can unfold around it and rotate it." ”
Ginobili can slow down, change direction and finish under the basket. But his Hall of Fame career also coincided with a revolution in professional basketball.
He came to an alliance controlled by big men like Duncan, Shaquille O'Neill, and Yao Ming, who caught our attention at the low post. By the time Ginobili retired, the league's entire aesthetic had shifted to rhythmic and spatial themes dominated by highly skilled outside players such as Stephen Curry, James Harden and Luka Doncic.
Ginobili's pace is both elegant and unpredictable, his ability to slow down in one corner is world-class, and his finishing ability under the basket is both diverse and effective. As Barry put it, "Once in the box, Manu has a million ways to strike out. ”
Twenty years ago, no one knew Ginobili's signature move would upend the NBA, but that's exactly what happened.
Nearly 20 years after Ginobili made his NBA debut, the move he showed at the most important moment of the most important game the sport must offer has become at the heart of the modern NBA. Attacking flanks like Ginobili are now one of the most coveted stars of the game. Even the league's most dominant interior scorer, Giannis Antetokounmpo — who was just 9 years old at Athens when Ginobili won his biggest career victory at the 2004 Olympics — rarely fit into the cap. He enters his own way and then uses the basket attack and the most iconic moves in basketball at the moment to complete the layup and dunk.
The heart of the Spurs
Everyone around the Spurs knows how lucky they are. The duo of Duncan, Ginobili, and Tony Parker is one of the greatest, and Duncan will go down in history as the most talented of the three, but his relatively restrained demeanor opens the door to Ginobili's position as the nucleus of the dynasty.
"He's more exemplary than Tim," Barry said. "The emotional content of the team runs through him."
In Ginobili's career, the Spurs reached the Western Conference Finals seven times, winning five of them. They will win four of the five Finals series they played in, with Ginobili averaging 14.0 points per game on the biggest stage of the tournament — higher than his career regular season average. But it's not just his performances, Ginobili brings an intensity that helps lead the Spurs through the toughest battles of professional basketball.
"You know those old fire sirens would say, 'In case the emergency glass breaks,'" Barry said. "For us, Manu was behind the glass. Manu is the one we rely on. Duncan is the embodiment of greatness, but sometimes we need Manu. ”
Ginobili had a way to lift the team when it was necessary to lift it, and the team responded in the same way. This was most evident in the 2014 Grand Finals. The San Antonio Spurs suffered a crushing defeat against the Miami Heat last season, and Ginobili worked particularly it. His 28-second penalty error left in Game 6 opened the door for the Heat's comeback, and his 44-second turnover in overtime cost the Spurs a chance to regain the lead.
The fifth match of the 2014 Finals almost erased those bad memories. The Spurs are home in San Antonio, leading the series 3-1 in two of the most dominant games in Finals history. Still, Miami took the lead early in Game 5 and wandered in the second quarter, when Ginobili kicked off and threw an epic dunk at KrisPosh that seemed to end any chance miami came back and put the proverbial nails in the coffin.
This is far from the first time Ginobili has risen with its iconic performance, nor will it be the last. In the 2017 Western Conference Semifinals, Ginobili, two months before his 40th birthday, locked up the Spurs' fifth game of victory with the Houston Rockets with James Harden's astonishing three-point shooting rate.
For Barry, Ginobili's ability to thrive in momentous moments was one of his defining characteristics: "He influenced the dressing room. He influenced the gymnasium. He influenced a country. ”
The ultimate winner
Let's sum it up with a simple statistic: Of the 141 players who have played at least 1,000 games in NBA history, no one has a higher win rate than Ginobili, who has won a staggering 72.1 percent of NBA games.
Popovich said a key reason for this incredible statistic is Ginobili's ability to prioritize team success over individual accolades.
"He's probably the most selfless player I've ever seen because he's a Hall of Famer who's been off the bench for most of his career because I think we have a better chance of winning games and if he does, then win the championship," Popovich said. "Not many people make that sacrifice."
Ginobili is one of only three players with more than 70 percent. The other two happen to be Ginobili's teammates, Duncan and Parker.
It's an incredible sign that proves the greatness of Ginobili and spurs is sustained and reliable.
He exited the NBA with a remarkable winning percentage, which is especially striking considering that his career began with a second-round draft pick and didn't debut in the NBA until three years after draft night.
However, when the NBA's 75th anniversary team was announced, Ginobili was not on the roster — though it was expanded to 76 players due to a draw.
Ginobili's resume is comparable to that of many players who have advanced, even though he was not selected as an All-Star. In any case, he is the second or third best player of the four championship teams. He was an icon for the team and had failed to win 50 games only once in his career – in his final season.
Simply put, Ginobili's legacy enumerates every box on the Great List. His four rings and winning percentage stats are convincing. His signature move changed the NBA forever. He is one of the most important international players in the history of the league.
But for those lucky enough to spend time with him, they all know that he is one of the greatest leaders and champions in basketball history, and his incredible resume is one of the most impressive in basketball history.
"He's great as a teammate, he's brilliant as a player," Popovich said, "and he's one of the kindest, most curious people I've ever met in my life." ”