PtR Survey: The most likeable and annoying Spurs of all time

There’s a lot of likeable Spurs to choose from, and maybe more annoying ones than you remember.

Welcome back to the PtR Survey, where we are following an online trend where fans are voting on players from their team to fill out a grid like the one below. Most recently, we did the most underrated and overrated Spurs of all time, and the results were as follows:

Most underrated was the closest poll yet considering a lot of Spurs are perennially underrated in no small part thanks to them being a small market team, but winning with 39% of the vote was Manu Ginobili. How can a Hall of Famer be underrated, you may ask? Well, while some forget that it is the BASKETBALL Hall of Fame, not NBA, many thought he was still unqualified, forgetting all he had contributed to the game both around the globe and in the US. Also, many use the fact that he only ever won one Sixth Man of the Year award (which was created in the middle of his career) to not consider him as the “best ever sixth man”, which is a travesty.

At most overrated, winning with 49% of the vote is everyone’s favorite former Spur, Richard Jefferson, who was brought in expecting to bring a scoring punch to a Spurs team that was trying to catch up offensively as the NBA was moving out of its most defensively-dominant era and putting more emphasis on the other side of the ball. After averaging 20 points per game across his previous five seasons in New Jersey and Milwaukee, Jefferson just couldn’t live up to the perhaps unfair hype placed on him when he came to San Antonio, and he was traded just two-and-half seasons later as the Spurs decided to go in a different direction.

Our next category is easier to define but may be just as hard to make pick, as they are more personality based. Beginning with Most Likeable, there is quite the abundance of contenders since the Spurs have been known to sign high quality characters. For me, these are players who were beloved by fans and teammates, locker room leaders, active in the community, represented the team well, and will always receive a loud round of applause when they appear at Spurs games. In this case, I couldn’t really narrow it down to just four options based both on feedback and my own gut feeling, so we have six! Good luck picking just one.

For Most Annoying Spur, there haven’t been as many of those over the years but still enough that I couldn’t narrow it down to just four. (As a side note, I considered making this “most unlikeable” to more mirror of the first category, but “most annoying” is what’s being used in these projects on social media, so I’m sticking with the norm for this one.)

These could be players who were problematic during their time with the Spurs (such as Dennis Rodman or Kawhi Leonard) or have become more annoying since they left. That would certainly be the case for players like Stephen Jackson and Robert Horry (and to a lesser extent, Jefferson), who have all gone out of their way to criticize the Spurs to the media and on podcasts, in some cases carrying 15-20 year-old gripes about role and playing time or making absurd claims like member of the Big Three costing the Spurs championships. That’s enough to make any fan’s blood boil.

All of these guys have annoyed Spurs fans on or off the court at some point or another, sometimes repeatedly, so again, good luck picking just one.

Be sure to vote, and remember, if “Other” wins in either poll, I will check the comments here and on social media, and the most liked will win.