Bruce Bowen Forward, San Antonio Spurs If defense wins championships, then the San Antonio Spurs have a very important player in Bruce Bowen. The eight-year veteran is one of the premier defenders in the NBA today. An NBA All-Defensive first team member last season, Bowen made the All-Defensive second team the previous three seasons. In 2003, Bowen was a key member of the Spurs championship team. Not bad for a guy who wasn't drafted out of Cal State Fullerton in 1993. Join Bruce in the Blog Squad as he talks about the Spurs and their quest for an NBA title.

Joaquin Henson :  Nov 26 Martin comes of age Of Title Games and Team Play Caught the NCAA tournament championship game on Monday. I wasn't in a pool, but my picks came to fruition because I had Illinois and North Carolina in the championship game. I was actually sad for Illinois and only from this standpoint: I felt like they had played consistently all year and to come up short at the end, that really was unfortunate. That's the way the ball bounces sometimes. They played together as a team the whole year and they accomplished goals as a team. Other teams had certain guys that were very good, but they didn't play as a team and they didn't do as well. And that's what we've lost in the game of basketball is the partnership of the team. And that's the cool thing about us, is that team aspect. If someone goes down, we always have some one to step in. Yeah, we depend a lot on Tim, but we put players around Tim to make our team better. In Chicago, they put guys around Mike to make their team better. The had role players around Mike to allow Mike to do even more on the court. That's what we have in San Antonio. Speaking of which, I noticed Tony Parker was featured on NBA.com this week. Tony has grown since he's been here because he's been in the system a while now and people are recognizing that. As far as Tony breaking out, as some would say, I couldn't point to something and say: "Well, he's done this, done that and done that," because it's been part of the plan all along. He's grown within the system and become the point guard we thought he could be. That's what I mean when we talk about being a team. We have Tony, who's not an All-Star caliber guard if Tim's not on the floor. But those two feed off one another and they get better with one another. And Manu Ginobili isn't an All-Star guard without Tim, Tony or myself. As for how we're playing now, if you remember last week's blog, I mentioned how we came out tentatively without Tim. We've been doing better of late. There are still some things we do better and go from there. I think we're playing with more urgency and it's not just "Hey, we've lost Tim and we're pitying ourselves." We're coming out and competing. Right now, we have 54 wins. We're close to 60 wins, but it wasn't in our thought process this season to get 60 wins. It's great if you can, it's a bonus in itself. That definitely wasn't something that came across this year. We understand that may happen or that it may not happen, but the important thing is that we play with the urgency to get victories -- any victories. Posted by Bruce Bowen - Apr 7 2005 3:39PM No Time to Lose Focus The Playoffs are near, but we have a season to finish When it comes to the end of the regular season, you have to take care of the business at hand. When you start trying to plan two or three weeks ahead of time, that's when things go south. There's no way you can do that. You still have to respect every team you play in this league, whoever it is, even though there record may not show a decent team. On the court, they're still NBA players, and you have to respect that. That's the worst thing you can do for yourself is something like that, because you take away the respect of the other team, and that's how upsets happen. Fans don't come here saying, 'Ahh, this is an easy one, ahh, this is a gimme. If you lose in an upset, the fans' thought process is, 'Weren't you guys prepared for that team?' You have to keep reiterating the preparation in practice. I remember when I was with Pat Riley in Miami. We were playing Golden State. They weren't very good at the time. The day before the practice, he was drilling us hard ? as if we were playing the Knicks. I remember someone saying, 'Man, we just playing Golden State.' I thought about that. I was like, 'He missed Riley's lesson at hand.' His lesson at hand was, 'I'm not going to allow you guys to come down a level because we're playing a team that on paper may not be as good as us.' 'So I'm going to keep raising the bar so that you will be much more prepared for this team come tomorrow night. You may moan and complain right now, but come game time tomorrow, you'll be inspired to play basketball the way we're capable of playing.' And we did. As for the playoffs, some people ask us: 'Does playoff seeding matter?' You want to say 'yes' because of home court advantage, but the flip side to that is you understand you want to have a big time focus going into other arenas away from home. So, you wish you have home court advantage, but if it doesn't happen, it is not the end of the world. You still understand, 'Hey, we got to go win on the road.' Maybe if we start out on the road there is a bigger focus on our behalf, and understanding that we have to do this or we have to do that accordingly in order to try to gain some type of momentum or ground over another team that we're playing. As far as our chances, I love this team. Sometimes people think that having the best players on paper will bring yourself a championship. Well Portland found that out the hard way that that's necessarily true. One year, they had Steve Smith, Brian Grant, Pip, Sheed Wallace, Stoudamire, Greg Anthony. They had a deep team. But it didn't bring them any championships. Sometimes when you have guys come in that have been a go-to guy prior to that team, it's hard for them to say, 'OK, I got to do this' or 'I have to take this role here.' We have a lot of good guys on the Spurs. I've been on bad teams before and I've been on teams that won even though we didn't have good guys. The atmosphere is the atmosphere of 'Hey, I want to come get better every day at practice. I wonder what we're going to do today because I'm sure we can learn to get better with one another.' Whereas sometimes you have those guys that are good on the court, and on the court only. They don't know how to communicate to other guys. It's like night and day when you are dealing with those kinds of people. Posted by Bruce Bowen - Mar 31 2005 2:04PM

Not Feeling Sorry for Ourselves Teams gear up to play us, with or without Tim Right now, we're playing without Tim Duncan. And we miss him on both ends of the floor. On defense, it hurts us from the standpoint that he understands our system. Every team in the league has a certain defensive philosophy or system. Tim being here his whole career, he understands this system better than anyone else could. And with that, you have guys of that talent and that nature that understand what's going on -- they know where to be at certain moments of the game. That's one of the things for newcomers; that's why when you get a good team in the beginning of the year, it takes time before they can completely gel together because guys are still learning while they're out there playing. So yeah, we miss him from the standpoint of just knowing the defensive philosophies that we have, and him trying to encourage other guys as well while he's on the court. You miss different aspects of his game. He can talk to you on the court and tell you where you need to be, and things of that nature. But we haven't changed anything on defense. I think the thing that was more disappointing for me is that I don't feel as if we competed the first two games without him -- in Indiana and then New York. It was kind of like 'Ohh, we're going to feel sorry for ourselves. Ohh, we don't have Tim.' You've got to understand, in this league, people are gunning for top teams, period. Tim's absence creates an opportunity for others whom may not have otherwise gotten an opportunity to play a lot. So here it is, you got an opportunity, show the coaches that 'Hey, we should keep this guy, even though he doesn't play a lot, we should keep him because he is doing this, this or that.' I think now we're starting to do that; playing with a sense of urgency which is necessary for us, and also ball movement. If we can play moving the ball the way we are without Tim, when he comes back, it's going to add another dimension to our game. We did that last year when Tim was out. That's why I was so frustrated with our play in New York and Indiana. Here it is, our core group was still here. We took the Lakers to double-overtime with their team last year. It is amazing that 'Hey, this is a situation that we've been here before fellas, and we're not playing like we have.' And I know I can bring that up in the locker room. All the things that I've been saying all year is really start to take effect now. It's funny how -- I was thinking about this the other day -- someone was saying, 'Bruce with your leadership, is it either more important now that Tim is out or how do you think about that?' My thought to that was, 'Wow, it's been a preparation for this moment for a while now.' Not to say that 'Yeah, we knew all along that Tim was going to be out.' No, we're not saying that, but all the things that I was saying before -- now it's not hard for guys to listen to me. Posted by Bruce Bowen - Mar 30 2005 1:35PM