My favorite basketball player ever is getting his jersey retired by the Spurs tonight. There will be a ceremony after the game against the Cavaliers, and I fully expect to get weepy watching.
Here’s a page on nba.com about his remarkable career, with testimonials from teammates and coaches. Here’s another with video retrospectives of key moments. ESPN put up a clip about how he changed the game by popularizing the euro-step. The classic article about him is probably still Zach Lowe’s “Welcome to Manu’s Basketball Familia,” well worth revisiting. And evergreen is Michael Lewis’s aside about Manu in his 2009 piece on Shane Battier and basketball statistics, “The No-Stats All-Star:”
The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.
I saw him for the first time in 2002, in person, at a Spurs game I attended with my high school girlfriend. He came off the bench and was immediately enthralling. I was screaming “Ginobili!”—a name I had to find on the roster to figure out who #20 was—before the game was done. He continued to amaze me for the next sixteen years.
What I loved most about him was that, while among the most creative and unpredictable players in the league, his intelligence wasn’t limited to basketball. Off the court he was curious and engaged, an inquisitive soul who would educate teammates about the placebo effect, engage his twitter followers on amateur astronomy, and write ecotourism articles. He was the first player I ever heard use the phrase “regression to the mean” during a postgame interview, and in a more statistically advanced NBA culture he would have been a perennial All-Star despite coming off the bench.
His willingness to give up individual stats for the good of the team, when he could have been James Harden before James Harden, remains one of the most astonishingly selfless things I’ve ever known an elite athlete to do. In his prime Manu was one of the very best basketball players in the world—he lead the Argentinian national team to the Olympic gold medal over Team USA, the only time another country has won gold in basketball since NBA players started competing in 1992. But he legitimately cared about winning more than individual accolades, something many stars claim but few demonstrate. It’s impossible to imagine Kobe Bryant sacrificing individual stats for the good of the team, but Manu (whose per-minute productivity was just as good) spent his whole career doing just that. It limited his awards, his earnings, the public perception of his talent, but it got him the thing he wanted most: through sixteen NBA seasons he won 72.1% of the games he played, the highest percentage in league history for players with over 1000 career games.
There’s never been a player I had more faith in with a game on the line. For my whole adult life I’ve gotten to watch Manu Ginobili do whatever it took to get the win. Timely steals, impossible passes, contortionist layups, game-sealing blocks, and buzzer-beater threes. Where Tim Duncan was steady and unshakable, Manu was the perennial X-factor, turning himself into exactly what the Spurs needed over and over again. When we thought we’d seen everything, he’d invent something new. The only sure thing was that, whatever he did, it would be remarkable. Popovich put it best: