The End of an Era: What's Next for the San Antonio Spurs?

Photo courtesy of Wages of Wins

This is part two of a series examining the future of each NBA team. Each piece examines the cap and roster situation as well as decisions that must be made. Click here for part one.

The San Antonio Spurs are the model for NBA franchises. They have won four championships since drafting Tim Duncan, and they came within seconds of winning a fifth. Their coaches and executives are poached by teams across the league and despite the ages of their core, the team continues to pile up wins. Yet at some point this has to end. It may not be this year, and it may not be next year, but as hard as it is to believe, there will come a day when Tim Duncan is no longer in uniform and Gregg Popovich no longer roams the sidelines.

The Spurs currently sit comfortably at the top of the Western conference standings, a place they know well. Their stars continue to play fewer minutes while being replaced by younger players like Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. Their offense is generally accepted as elite, though this year it's been their defense making the difference. San Antonio gives up a mere 93.5 points per 100 possessions, good for second in the league. It's early, but if these trends hold, there is no reason to think the Spurs can't compete for another title, though the Western Conference is as tough as it's been in years. When you look beyond this year, things get more interesting.

Tim Duncan has a $10 million player option for next season, and assuming he exercises it, the Spurs will return all five starters, dealing only with the expiring contracts of Boris Diaw, Matt Bonner, Nando De Colo, Patty Mills, and Aron Baynes. These players have played a combined 22.1 percent of the Spurs minutes, not an insignificant figure, but either re-signing or replacing them shouldn't be overly difficult. After that is when things get far more interesting.

The Spurs currently have only Tiago Splitter on the books for the 2015-16 season, ignoring cap holds. Based on logic detailed here, we will use an estimated salary cap of $63 million. They likely will sign Kawhi Leonard to a sizable extension before the summer of 2015, so for these purposes he will be assigned a max contract which would pay him a little under $16 million using the estimated cap. Those contracts combine for $24.25 million, which after accounting for minimum cap holds, gives the Spurs around $33 million in cap space.  Obviously by this time the Spurs will have more than two players, but that is the point of this exercise. After next year, the Spurs will essentially have a clean slate. Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili will likely be gone, probably bringing coach Gregg Popovich with them, and a whole new era of Spurs basketball will begin. They can hold onto Parker, perhaps at a bit of a Duncanesque discount, and attempt to build around Splitter, Leonard, and him, or they can let Parker go and try to build some other way. Either way, things are going to be drastically different in a relatively short amount of time.

For years there has been a question of who has been most responsible for the Spurs success. Is Gregg Popovich truly one of the greatest coaches of all-time, or has he just been a coattail rider of one of the best big men the sport has ever seen? What kind of success might Manu Ginobili have experienced given his own team? Where does Tony Parker rank among the generation's best point guards? As we are seeing now, these questions will almost certainly never be answered. Popovich has said that he intends to retire when Duncan does, and Ginobili more than likely will be right there with them. By that point, it will be too late for Parker to show what his true talents are, and the torch may instead be handed to Kawhi Leonard, or maybe even someone who isn't in a Spurs uniform yet.

Whatever the case, the one question we may get an answer to is the one regarding the organizational strategy. GMs like Sam Presti and Rob Hennigan were hired to bring the Spurs' philosophy elsewhere, hoping to replicate the team's success. Without perhaps the greatest power forward of all time, we will be able to see more clearly whether or not the Spurs are capable to sustain success. San Antonio remains a very legitimate title contender for this year, and maybe next as well, but we are quickly nearing the end of a largely under-appreciated era of dominance.

All stats courtesy of NBA.com. Salary information courtesy of Spotrac.com. Stats updated through Sunday, December 1.