ESPN voices are Spur’ed to admit network’s ‘selfish’ role

Twice this NBA season we have been gifted a sweet reminder that successful, senses-satisfying basketball can be a team enterprise, five men acting at once toward the single goal of scoring as easily as possible in order to win.

First there was the Jeremy Lin run-’n-fun stretch. Now the nearly annual reminder from the too easily ignored Spurs that playing nicely with others wins games, for whatever that’s worth.

Yep, two chances to recall that the give-and-go preceded the give-now-go-away.

Of listen-between-the-lines significance was what ESPN NBA analyst Tim Legler said Wednesday morning on ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” — words that sounded like another ESPN analyst, from the inside out, identifying the two worst things to happen to basketball in this country:

1) ESPN and, 2) sneaker company-funded (mostly Nike) AAU basketball.

Legler spoke of the coached and conditioned unselfishness of the Spurs, how “they give up decent shots for even better shots,” how they communicate, how they’re unconcerned with how many minutes they play, how “they play for one another.”

Then he made it plain — I think, I hope — that his network has been no friend of basketball: “If you don’t appreciate [how the Spurs play], you’re not a basketball fan; you’re a highlights fan.”

Next he addressed San Antonio’s Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and uncomplaining sixth-man Manu Ginobli for what they aren’t.

Duncan, raised on St. Croix, “Spent four years in college [graduated Wake Forest]” said Legler. “Parker [French] and Ginobli [Argentine] are not from the United States. They didn’t experience that AAU culture of selfishness,” adding that it begins when kids are identified and indulged as stars “as young as 12 years old.” Nice.

In recent months, ESPN pushed other ESPNers further than Legler.

Lead college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit has blamed ESPN for feeding and rewarding acts of on-field incivility.

NBA analyst Jalen Rose blamed ESPN’s mindless, context-less reliance on me-first highlights for why then-Wizard JaVale McGee chose to perform a super-showboat slam, with his team down six — an act that led to his benching.

It’s highly unlikely that what Lin did over three weeks, or the Spurs have done over 15 years, or what lately has been spoken by ESPNers on ESPN about ESPN’s insidious influences will change anything for the better.

After all, it’s difficult to take people back to a place they’ve never been.

But, even if futile, it’s nice to know that a few people in public places — places where pandering to what’s hip for the minute ensures security — still recognize and point to the problems, just the same. Yup, sometimes it’s gratifying to hear others knock their heads against the wall.

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