For the overwhelming part of two remarkable decades, the San Antonio Spurs operated inside an N.B.A. time capsule, a Texas-size vacuum, an orderly league of their own. They played with a one-for-all precision and went about their off-court business with a committed predictability.
They were Spurs to the bone, appearing to the outside world, individually and collectively, to have a conscience for comportment and no penchant for crisis.
They persisted in this commercially unsexy manner to little fanfare and only at the conclusion of their fifth championship run in 2014 to any widespread acclaim, and mostly because they had thoroughly dismantled LeBron James’s Miami Heat.