We doubt this thrums the competitive juices of Miami, but as the anticipation builds before Game 1 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio on Thursday, a Clear Channel billboard was spotted extolling the virtues of San Antonio’s homegrown talent. This despite the majority of the Spurs roster coming from outside America — or in the case of Kawhi Leonard, from another planet.
Kirk Goldsberry wrote about San Antonio’s foreign legion for Grantland today, and there’s a graphic they made showing 10 of the Spurs’ 14 active players coming from outside the United States.
This billboard might even be a leftover from last season’s championship rumble, as reddit commenter, Redbutter, noted on the r/NBA thread of the image.
That’s not what makes the spirit of this billboard somewhat of a misnomer, though.
Billboard in San Antonio takes a shot at the Miami Heat…. "Built vs Bought" pic.twitter.com/2g0rRrPmCY
— Sports Update (@MySportsUpdate) June 3, 2014
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No, what makes the billboard bizarre is how unhinged from reality the insult falls. The Heat didn’t entice LeBron James and Chris Bosh to sign in the summer of 2010 because they would make more money. In fact, the two free agents took a little less than the max in order to come together as a collective with Dwyane Wade for a championship push. Wade even sacrificed alpha status on his team for LeBron, and Bosh continually drifts outside the paint — where he did the majority of his work while becoming an all-star with Toronto — to become the fulcrum of their small-ball offense as a defense-stretching center.
Still, the Spurs have kept the same core three players together for more than a decade; so long in fact, the trio of Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan has won more playoff games together than any other threesome in NBA history.
Maybe that’s what Clear Channel meant with the billboard, or it was just a catchy phrase with some alliteration that a tired and overworked executive signed off on without thinking about the particulars of the phrase in relation to Miami’s history.
What do you think?
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