Overlook Pistons and Spurs at your own risk

The Pistons visit San Antonio tonight, the teams looking enough like the 2005 NBA Finals opponents to rekindle memories of the only Finals to go the full seven games in the past 14 years. That should be enough to get this game listed first on the NBA marquee.

But with NBA attention riveted on the runaway starts by the Celtics, Lakers and Cavaliers - a combined 45-6 through Monday's games - Pistons-Spurs feels like the "Hey, What About Us?" game.

When Manu Ginobili started the season on the inactive list after having surgery to repair ankle damage exacerbated by his Beijing Olympics experience, and then Tony Parker went down with a badly sprained ankle of his own, pundits wondered if the Spurs - whose every-other-year cycle of winning NBA titles comes due again in June - would even make the playoffs this season. But they're sitting at 9-7, Parker and Ginobili are back, and you can bet nobody will be happy to see the Spurs come the playoffs.

Same for the Pistons. When Joe Dumars stunned the basketball world with his month-ago trade of Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson, some saw it as a move made more with the future than the present in mind and wrote off the Pistons' chances of lasting into yet another June.

You can bet that there won't be a skeptic on either side tonight, though. The Pistons and Spurs hold each other in the highest esteem, from the top of the organizational flow chart to the 15th man in street clothes at the end of the bench.

It's no accident that these two teams have managed to sustain success, even though they haven't used quite the same blueprint.

It starts with the key decision-maker in each franchise. That's Joe D for the Pistons, of course; for the Spurs, it's their coach, Gregg Popovich. Power is centralized in his hands in San Antonio, surrounding himself with astute personnel evaluators and letting them do their jobs.

Dumars built the Pistons through terrific trades (Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace), a phenomenal record for picking up free agents on the cheap (Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace) and finding in the draft players who greatly exceeded their slot (Tayshaun Prince, Jason Maxiell, Rodney Stuckey, Arron Afflalo, Amir Johnson).

Popovich had the great good fortune of timing in San Antonio, being named head coach in December 1996 and winning the lottery six months later for one of the biggest no-brainer No. 1 picks of all-time, Tim Duncan. Who knows if any of the four titles they've won since Duncan came on board would have been possible without him?

But this much is certain, too: If the Popovich-led Spurs hadn't found All-Stars Ginobili and Parker late in the draft, the last three of those banners wouldn't be flying above center court at the AT&T Center when the Pistons take the floor tonight. And Popovich and GM R.C. Buford have shown great touch in finding the perfect role players to put around them, taking Bruce Bowen off the journeyman's scrap heap and grabbing Robert Horry when he was highly productive, to name the two most prominent.

The teams are approaching a similar transitional stage now, too. Duncan, though still a bona fide All-Star, probably shouldn't be playing the 35 minutes a game he's had to play to this point to cover for the Ginobili and Parker absences, just as Wallace has had to play extended minutes until Antonio McDyess' imminent return to give the Pistons a scoring threat in their frontcourt.

Both teams are attempting to defy the convention that suggests a downturn is inevitable after an extended period of success by rebuilding on the fly. With the Pistons, the future is led by Stuckey, a dynamic young point guard, with Hamilton and Prince still with prime years ahead of them, and potentially outstanding role players in Johnson, Maxiell and Afflalo - not to mention the money Joe D is going to have at his disposal sometime over the next two summers to spend on the bountiful crop of free agents about to blossom.

The Spurs' future is a little less certain. Duncan is a virtually irreplaceable talent. But Parker is still only 26 and Ginobili 31. The Spurs' signing of 3-point marksman Roger Mason was one of the most astute acquisitions of last off-season. They raised eyebrows by drafting little-known IUPUI point guard George Hill late in the first round, but he's already standing out amid a bumper crop of rookies. Young big man Ian Mahinmi hasn't shown much yet, but the Spurs see in him what the Pistons see in Johnson.

And always, the Spurs, like the Pistons, invest prudently. They don't throw another year onto contract offers they know they'll regret, they don't sweeten deals with future draft picks unless the payoff is clear, they don't spend themselves into salary-cap purgatory.

The Pistons and Spurs are constants. They might be playing the role of the tortoise to the hares of the Celtics, Lakers and Cavs of early December, but let's see where everybody's at come April and May. You might want to pay particular attention tonight.

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