Bob Cook

Tim Duncan gets a lot of flak for being boring, but players far more exciting have a long way to go before matching his four titles, three NBA Finals MVP trophies, two regular-season MVP honors, and legitimate sidekick to Bill Russell in the realm of pro basketball’s most efficient and effective big men.

Cognizant of this, the Phoenix Suns and the New Orleans Hornets have treated Duncan as he should be — the most important player to stop in these playoffs.

It doesn’t matter whether Kobe Bryant wins this year‘s MVP, or how many Saturday Night Live hosting gigs LeBron James gets, or how semi-truck-sized the bandwagon for Chris Paul becomes. The defining postseason player for the last decade is Duncan. Fail to stop him, as Phoenix learned (again), and you may as well clear the River Walk for another Spurs championship boat ride.

The difficulty of stopping Duncan is trying to take him out of the game, on both ends of the court, on and off the ball, without kneecapping him or otherwise resorting to some illegal means. For example: Justin Kubatko of Basketball-Reference.com computed that while Boston’s Kevin Garnett, stat-nerd speaking, ranked ahead of him as the most effective defensive player, Duncan led the NBA in a stat called defensive win shares — basically, at least six of San Antonio’s 56 regular-season victories can be attributed to Duncan's defense.

Phoenix acquired Shaquille O’Neal expressly to stop the 7-foot, 245-pound Duncan, who nominally plays power forward. That didn’t work.

Duncan averaged 24.8 points, 13.8 rebounds and 2.4 blocks, all above his regular-season numbers (19.3, 11.3, 1.9), which were down not so much because Duncan is getting more enfeebled at 32, but because he willingly ceded more of the offense to Manu Ginobili, the Spurs’ leading scorer (19.5) and Tony Parker. Forget Duncan’s last-second, overtime 3-pointer, his only one of the year, to keep the Spurs alive in Game 1 against Phoenix in the first round. How many big men have the confidence of their teammates to see the ball in that situation?

“As the game progresses [Duncan] gets a sense of what is needed and what’s not needed … You might think he’s taking a secondary role sometimes, but he isn’t,” Duncan’s coach at Wake Forest, Dave Odom, recently told the San Antonio Express-News.

When it became clear that New Orleans, from the first moment of the first game of its Eastern Conference semifinal, was going to be all over Duncan on offense like crazed brides on a prize dress at the annual Filene’s wedding sale, Duncan immediately shifted his strategy on offense. Duncan, one of the best passing big men ever, quickly popped the ball out of the block to an open teammate for a clear jump shot. Or he set picks up high to clear Parker through the lane, or rolled off the pick to take defenders down with him so the 3-point line would be clear.

On defense, he guarded either Tyson Chandler or Melvin Ely as a backstop against Paul driving the lane for an open layup, or for an alley-oop to Chandler. On one first-half play, Duncan stepped in front of his man for a steal, and took the ball coast-to-coast before drawing a foul on a layup. Going the other way, Duncan often hurried back and parked himself by the hoop, beating Paul and the rest of the Hornets offense down the floor to help stop a fast break.

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