Remembering Manu Ginobili, a completely modern player before his time

Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images

A look back at the brilliance of Spurs legend Manu Ginobili.

Last off-season, I spent the entirety of my basketball life working on a mini-series called “Blazing the Trail.” In that series, we focused on 10 players with skill sets that made them ahead of their time. Guys like Rashard Lewis, Reggie Miller, and Chauncey Billups were all subjects of analysis.

However, one notable omission was Argentina’s Flying Man, Manu Ginobili. The reason for this was that his progressiveness was too expansive to fit neatly into a single chapter. Where the players I alluded to earlier all had specific skills/attributes that made them revolutionary, Ginobili’s entire game was ahead of his time. In a sense, he was a completely modern player.

Let’s start with his offense. Ginobili was a dependent scorer but not in the traditional sense. He didn’t lean on his teammates to create open looks for him like he was a guard-sized Clint Capela. No, no, Ginobili’s scoring (and playmaking) was solely reliant on what the defense was doing. You see, Ginobili was a precursor to the read-and-react movement that now occupies the NBA landscape.

Take this play, for instance:

Teammate Tim Duncan comes up to initiate a side pick-and-roll. However, Ginobili notices Pau Gasol is cheating over to hedge, so he rejects the screen and attacks baseline. As he attacks toward the rim, he notices the defense collapsing in front of him and turns to his patented euro-step (a move he popularized) to avoid traffic before kicking the ball out to a wide-open Brent Barry (a career 40.5 percent three-point shooter).

Ginobili was a master of interpreting the defense’s movements and quickly selecting the perfect counter for each coverage. And there are two main reasons for that.

First, Ginobili could read the game quickly because he thought the game quickly. The San Antonio Spurs didn’t integrate a full-fledged .5 offense until the mid-2010s (aka The Beautiful Game Spurs), but Ginobili was making half-second decisions long before then.

In the first clip, Tony Parker unloads the ball after drawing a second defender, and Ginobili immediately responds by ricocheting the Spalding over to the rolling Duncan. And in the second clip, the ball appears to be heading out of bounds off a Spurs miss, and Ginobili not only saves it, but he has the presence of mind to shovel it over to DeJuan Blair (remember that guy) for an easy layup.

With that said, being able to read the game is only half the equation. Once you’ve figured out what the defense is doing, you need to have the capacity to do something about it. You need to be able to react to the situation. And the reason Ginobili could react to any situation is because he was so skilled.

If the defense hedged, he could reject the screen (like the clip above) or split it (first clip in the montage below). If the defense played him in a deep drop, he could burn them from the midrange (second clip) or with his passing (third and fourth clip). And if they switched, he would use the moment of openness to pull up for a triple (fifth clip) or would just give the ball up, get it back, and blow by the slower defender (sixth clip).

We could play this game all day. Ginobili could do quite literally everything on offense. He could shoot (career 36.9 percent 3-point shooter), he could pass (finished 74th percentile or higher in Ben Taylor’s Passer Rating metric every year of his career), he could handle (you saw him split that double right?), and he could drive (67th percentile or higher in rim frequency twelve times in his career, per Cleaning the Glass).

Ginobili was equipped to handle anything the defense threw at him. And it wasn’t just when he was on the ball, either. Today, we marvel at Stephen Curry’s ability to relocate at the 3-point line after he initially gives up the ball. Well, Ginobili had reached sage status in this practice before Curry even got his acceptance letter from Davidson.

And also like Curry, he could counter aggressive ball denial tactics with sharp back cuts. He smokes the layup on this one, but the point remains the same.

To maximize their effectiveness, though, today’s off-ball players can’t just be good shooters and cutters. As we talked about last season with Trey Murphy III, they need to be able to put the ball on the deck and drive hard closeouts in order to maintain/capitalize on the advantages generated by others.

Having that function wasn’t really a requirement when Ginobili was doing his thing in the dead-ball era. But he had that trick in his bag anyways, utilizing the same powers (and his legendary negative step) that made him a read-and-react savant in pick-and-roll to dissect the tilted floors his teammates created for him.

We haven’t even mentioned his penchant for foul-grifting. You know how DeMar DeRozan uses his pump fake to draw fouls on his jumpers? Ginobili was doing that two decades ago. Although, when you think about it, so was Kobe Bryant (that’s probably where DeRozan got it from).

But do you know what Bryant wasn’t doing? Aggressively hunting for fouls while playing defense. Thanks to his veteran savvy, wild style, and bombastic flailing, Ginobili became one of the progenitors of the flopping movement (that has now spread across the league so rapidly that the NBA has had to implement rule changes in the hopes of eliminating it). This significantly juiced his defensive value, as he was able to put a stop to possessions without the other team even getting a shot up. Kyle Lowry salutes you, my friend.

For those unfamiliar with NBA nomenclature, charge drawing is a subcategory of defensive playmaking. Things like charges, deflections, and steals are immensely valuable. Some may argue that they are even more valuable than traditional on-ball defense. Even the best on-ball defender could have a jumper drained in their face (just ask Jrue Holiday). But if you get a steal, you remove all possibility of the other team scoring on that possession. That’s why some people view Matisse Thybulle so highly as a defender.

I mention this because, while many of the perimeter players of Ginobili’s time prided themselves on being isolation shutdown specialists, Ginobili set his sights on greater pursuits. He became a master at defensive playmaking. Along with his charge drawing, Ginobili ranked in the 92nd percentile or higher in steal percentage at his position every year from 2003 to 2011. And he even perfected Michael Jordan’s iconic sneak attack double team.

He was still a credible man defender. But his understanding of the bigger picture (creating turnovers means more than bragging rights) and his ability to calculated risks made him a more forward-thinking perimeter defender when compared to many of his peers. And when you combine that with his offensive game – one that was perfectly tailored for read-and-react basketball – you have a player who was playing basketball the way we do today all the way back in the mid-2000s.