Mike Celizic

Break up the Spurs and I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean break them up for real, and while you’re at it, break up the rest of the NBA West.

There’s been a lot of talk about how this exhibition series that is masquerading as the NBA Finals can be laid at the feet of LeBron James.

He’s got to step it up, some people are still saying, become Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, too. Being Bill Cartwright and Steve Kerr wouldn’t hurt either. You know the drill: take charge, take it to the hole, be the man.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

LeBron is doing everything he can. But against the Spurs, that’s not a lot.

Zydrunas Ilgauskas, the Cavs’ center, has disappeared, and other than rookie Daniel Gibson, the Cavs have no option after LeBron.

The Spurs, on the other hand, spread the scoring among Tony Parker, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, and the Cavs have no answer for any of them.

If the Spurs win, which is like saying if Rush makes fun of Hillary, it will be four titles for San Antonio since 1999. And it’s just a shame that none of them have been consecutive.

If the Spurs had only won the three they have consecutively, they’d be talked about as one of the great dynasties the game has ever produced. But it was the Lakers who won three straight, a streak bookended by San Antonio’s first and second titles. And it is the Lakers who are talked about as one of the greatest teams.

But what the Spurs have done is even more difficult. They keep coming back and winning again even as the rest of the league keeps trying to stop them.

You may get them this year, but you won’t get them every year.

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If they were playing in the East, they might be on their eighth straight finals by now. But they’re in the West, home of all the great teams in the game. The Suns are a fast-breaking thrill show. The Mavs, though fatally flawed in the toughness department, are far more talented than any East team. The Jazz probably could have beaten the Cavs, too.

I know that somehow the East won two of the last three NBA titles. But there were extenuating circumstances.

Last year’s Heat victory over Dallas can be explained — the Mavs misplaced their heart on the way to the Finals. And the Pistons’ win over the Lakers in 2004 can be seen as one of those occasions when all the planets aligned in the form of a consummate Detroit team catching the three-time champion Lakers in a quarrelsome and stale funk.

Other than those two years, it’s been all West going back to 1998, when the Chicago Jordans won their third in a row and the last of their six. But in the two years when Jordan was off proving that he couldn’t play baseball, it was the West again.

The Cavaliers don’t stink — at least not by the casual standards of the East. They beat the Pistons, whom many thought to be the only Eastern team that could give the West a fight.

And they did it by winning four straight after dropping the first two.

But they can’t stack up against the Spurs. No one in the East can.

These things run in cycles, and the East is sure to rise again — some day.

The Cavs will continue to improve and the Bulls have a promising young team.

But the only way to restore competitive balance between the two cardinal compass points is to just break up the West. Make every team give up one starting player to be thrown into a pool for the East to pick over.

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Okay, so that’s a fantasy. And I’m the last one who would want to see great teams broken up simply because they’ve made winning look too easy.

The trouble with the Spurs is that they are too damned good. They don’t need flash or highlight reel moves to beat you. They just have players with great fundamentals who play the game the way it’s supposed to be played.

Right now, they’re like the Yankees were in the late 1990s, just better than teams in their own league and two notches better than anyone in the other league.

Like it was with the Yankees, it looks as if they’ll be this way forever.

They won’t be, of course. No one is. Short of breaking them up, there’s nothing left to do but appreciate just how good they are.

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