PtR Survey: The most underrated and overrated Spurs of all time

Who doesn’t get enough respect, and who had too much coming in but didn’t live up to it?

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. We started with the Best and Worst Spurs of all time and came to two unsurprising answers.

There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that Tim Duncan, who won a whopping 93% of the votes, is the best to ever don the Silver and Black — having won 5 championships, 3x Finals MVP, 2x MVP, 15x All-NBA and 15x All-Defense — but there was a bit of debate over what actually defines the “worst” player. Still, in the end, Joshua Primo won with a relatively comfortable 47% of the vote. Picked 12th overall in 2021 — well ahead of where anyone else had him — he showed some promise as a rookie and won over fans with his potential and cheery attitude before being suddenly waived early in his second season for lascivious behavior. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

Next comes a slightly more complicated (in my opinion) topic: the most underrated and overrated Spurs of all time. For underrated, it was hard for me to look past how overlooked some of the Spurs’ stars were (and still are). There’s the Spurs’ original star in George “the Iceman” Gervin. It may have helped had his entire career been in the NBA instead of split with the ABA, but he’s still an all-time great who is often overlooked in modern days.

Then there’s two of the Spurs more recent stars in Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. They were never underrated by Spurs fans, but they often seemed to be overlooked from the outside (unless it fits the narrative to prop them up because someone is trying to claim Duncan is overrated — funny how that works). The fact that neither made the 75th Anniversary Team seemed wildly disrespectful, especially when looking at some who did get in over them.

Finally, I tried to include a role player in here, and I went with one who I think was underrated even by Spurs fans: Tiago Splitter. Many just remember the Spurs moving Boris Diaw to the starting lineup for the final two rounds of the 2014 playoffs and take that to mean Splitter wasn’t good enough. On the contrary, this was just a matchup move, and many forget how important he was in the first two rounds against the taller Mavericks and Trail Blazers, while Diaw couldn’t match up with their starting bigs.

For most overrated, we have players who came in expecting to help the Spurs continue their winning ways but either didn’t contribute as much as expected or couldn’t even keep them in the winning category. First are a couple of players in the former category: LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan. Both saw success as stars on other teams, but that was when they were more like the 1b’s on their former teams and had more star help. While both were given nearly impossible tasks to replace big names (Duncan and Kawhi Leonard, respectively), it’s probably worth considering that Aldridge came on his own volition, while DeRozan had no choice.

Next is someone who was being clamored for in the “worst” category: Richard Jefferson. While far from the worst Spur ever, he certainly came in with much higher expectations than he delivered. Some of that can be blamed on Gregg Popovich for trying to turn someone who had been the first or second option before his arrival into simply a 3-and-D player, but he still vastly underwhelmed.

In turn, he was traded for someone who probably overrates himself more than anything: Stephen Jackson. While Jax contributed plenty as a role player to the 2003 championship, he then left hoping to be the top dog elsewhere. Instead, he ended up being a journeyman due behavioral and attitude issues, but everyone was still initially thrilled to have him back in San Antonio in 2012, including himself. However, he soon alienated himself again over a perceived lack of a role, and he has been griping about it ever sense.

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.