In 1999, they won their first title, beating a Knicks team that was playing without Patrick Ewing, but in 2000, they went down in five in the first round to then-lowly Phoenix.

Okay, no one wins every year, not even the Yankees. But San Antonio has been one of the elite teams in the league for a decade, and it has had more disappointing playoffs in that time than it has triumphant ones.

Too often, the Spurs have done what they did Sunday in Seattle — failed to play with the ferocity and passion and desire that marks great teams.

Some of that has to come from the coach, and it’s true that Gregg Popovich is a pretty good and very likeable guy. And some has to be the result of being very big heroes in a town that has no one else to idolize. No matter what they do, as long as they put up good records and put legitimate role models like David Robinson and Tim Duncan on the court, they’ve done all that’s asked of them.

You expect them to win this series, but last year you expected them to beat the Lakers, who, as Detroit proved, weren’t nearly as good as everybody — including the Lakers themselves — thought they were.

They’re better than Seattle. It’s as simple as that.

But they’re not that much better, as the Sonics showed in their two wins.

The Spurs seemed utterly unconcerned. They didn’t, after all, lose home-court advantage. They’d just lost a game and were going home for another. Ho-hum.

And if they’d played with determination to show these upstarts what happens when you talk smack about the Spurs, you could almost forgive a loss and write it off to the Sonics playing on home-court adrenaline. But — again with the exception of Duncan — the Spurs brought nothing to the court. They let Jerome James diss them and, while they didn’t let him score, they didn’t shut him up.

The Spurs were called out and they didn’t answer the call.

Where’s the passion?

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