By most accounts, Manu Ginobili's path to the Basketball Hall of Fame is one of the most unlikely in the sport's history. At pick No. 57, he was the second-to-last player drafted in 1999, and he didn't make his NBA debut until three seasons later, by which point he was already 25 years old. During his 16-year NBA career -- all spent with the small-market San Antonio Spurs -- he came off the bench for more than 700 of his 1,057 career games.
Yet Ginobili was an easy choice as a Hall of Famer, so much so that he's going in on the first ballot. He's one of the most successful international players in the sport's entire history. He won a EuroLeague title and four championships in the NBA, and he led Argentina to a legendary gold medal in the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Still, his lasting impacts go far beyond those bullet points. Ahead of Ginobili's enshrinement on Saturday, we talked to some of the people who watched his remarkable career unfold to help understand how five separate legacies combine to form one of the single most impressive résumés in recent memory.
The diamond in the rough
Current Spurs CEO R.C. Buford had just been promoted from head scout to director of scouting in the summer of 1997. One of his first jobs in that role was attending the FIBA World Championships For Men Under 22 in Australia -- an event that had been held once before and was discontinued in 2005.
Earlier that summer the Spurs drafted Tim Duncan with the No. 1 pick in the draft, and while Buford didn't know it at the time, that trip to Melbourne would change San Antonio's basketball fortunes forever.
While few other NBA teams scouted the event, Buford got a first-hand look at a then-22-year-old Ginobili.
"He had passion and a lot of competitiveness," Buford told ESPN of his first impression of the future Hall of Famer. "Argentina made it into the medal round, which was the best that they had ever done at the time."
Gregg Popovich, who was the Spurs' GM at the time, recalls a similar initial response to watching the Argentinian prospect.
"The first time I saw him in action, he was perhaps the most fearless competitor I'd seen in a long time," Popovich told ESPN. "He had a skinny body and a heart and a drive that were different from everyone else on the court."
Ginobili averaged 10.9 points and 1.5 assists for Argentina in the event, and posted a team-high 20 points in the squad's semifinal loss to Australia.
Two years later Ginobili was playing professionally in Italy, where he helped lead Viola Reggio Calabria to promotion from the second division to the first. Meanwhile, the Spurs had just won their first NBA title and had little reason to keep their first-round pick, No. 29 overall. It was the team's intention to bring back the entire title-winning roster, so San Antonio traded the pick to the Dallas Mavericks.
"We didn't want to draft anyone that we'd be forced to roster," Buford said.
The Spurs ended up taking a flier on Ginobili with their second-round pick, No. 57 overall. The plan was to claim his NBA rights but keep him stashed in Italy for at least two more seasons.
While the Spurs waited, Ginobili blossomed playing for coach Ettore Messina in Italy.
"As time went on obviously, he did a great job in Europe and won championships with Coach Messina," Popovich said.
In Italy, Messina had a front-row seat as Ginobili quickly became the most dominant star in European hoops.
"In 2000-2001 we traded for him and he became a starter immediately," Messina told ESPN. "By the end of the year, he was the MVP of the EuroLeague finals and of the Italian league. We swept all the competitions."
Messina said that early in his European career, Ginobili was a raw, rim-attacking wing, but in Bologna, "He improved his jump shot, and he improved his ability to see open teammates when driving, becoming aware of where his best shooter was located while he was using a pick and roll."
"He started to understand the value of a possession in high-pressure games like the EuroLeague and Italian finals."
He turned heads at the 2002 FIBA World Championships in Indianapolis, leading Argentina to a stunning second-round win against the United States. It was the first time Team USA had lost while using NBA players.
"We have given hope to many teams," Ginobili said at the time. "The U.S. is no longer the best in the world. ... I think they are not happy for sure."
Ginobili & Co. reached the gold medal game before falling to Serbia and Montenegro -- a game in which Ginobili was limited to 12 minutes of action because of an injury.
His NBA debut was still more than a month away, but it was already clear Ginobili was on a path to greatness. Once he joined the Spurs that fall, he immediately slid into Popovich's rotation, averaging 20.7 minutes per game as a rookie for a team that would bring San Antonio its second NBA title.
Ginobili turned out to be one of the biggest steals in draft history, and his emergence from pick No. 57 to ultimate winner forced NBA front offices to reconsider how they were scouting foreign players and using their draft picks.
"If we knew he was that good," Buford said, laughing, "we would've taken him at 29."
The golden generation's greatest
Two years after settling for silver in Indianapolis, Ginobili took Argentina a step further at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
In the semifinals, Ginobili lit up a Team USA squad that included Duncan, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade, scoring 29 points to lead Argentina to an 89-81 win. He'd add six assists in the gold medal game as Argentina beat Italy 84-69 to win the Olympic title for the first time. Ginobili finished the tournament averaging 19.3 points -- fourth-best among all players behind fellow Hall of Famers Pau Gasol and Yao Ming, and New Zealand's Phill Jones.
"He was part of the group that changed how the game was viewed around the world," Buford said.
While most Americans continue to view that tournament as a debacle, the rest of the world sees it as a proof of concept for how to defeat Team USA. Just 12 years after the Dream Team stormed the international competition in Barcelona, Ginobili and his Argentinian teammates proved that basketball no longer belonged solely to the United States.
Ginobili and the golden generation of Argentinian players that included Luis Scola, Fabricio Oberto and Pepe Sanchez not only helped popularize basketball in the land of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, they also propelled their national team to one of the biggest triumphs in the entire history of the sport.
Not many players can claim to be the best basketball player ever from their home continent, but make no mistake, Ginobili is far and away the greatest South American hooper, and Oberto says Ginobili's successes opened the door for many other players from his continent.
"He was the best advertisement for South American players," Oberto told ESPN. "Manu showing the NBA what we could do opened the door for a lot of us to get signed."
The 2004 Argentinian team remains the only one to win gold other than those representing the United States since NBA players were first allowed to play in the Olympics in 1992.
The Eurostep pioneer
Following Ginobili's retirement announcement in 2018, LeBron James tweeted a congratulatory message to him adding, "The game of basketball has you to thank for the most swag move in..basketball right now which is the "Euro Step"!!!!
Ginobili did not invent the Eurostep, and he wasn't even the first NBA player to use the move in the league, but he made it famous -- and now it's fundamental for today's superstars.
"He became a style-changer," Popovich said, "and a lot of the things he did, everybody in America started to copy."
Ginobili is partially responsible for introducing the NBA to the Eurostep, a move so technically savvy that early in Ginobili's NBA career, league officials struggled to determine its legality. They often incorrectly whistled Ginobili for traveling in his rookie campaign.
The move is designed to maximize the value of the driver's legally allowed two steps -- it goes right up to the edge of a traveling violation without committing one. A Eurostepping attacker essentially takes two big hops; one goes one way, the next goes a different way. The first hop is what a defender often tries to guard, then the hop back in the other direction either creates a clean look at the basket or creates enough contact with a flailing defender to produce a shooting foul.
"He wasn't the first to bring it," Buford said, "but he was the first to bring it as proficiently. It was just at a level that nobody had ever seen."
Šarūnas Marčiulionis, the great Lithuanian player, is frequently credited for introducing the Eurostep into the NBA in the 1990s, but former Spur Brent Barry says it was Ginobili who took the two-step maneuver to new heights in the early 2000s as he became a key piece of a dynasty in San Antonio.
"I played a lot with Šarūnas, and he had that in his game, but he was a more compact player with strength," Barry told ESPN. "He didn't have the stride, the ballerina beauty or the grace changing his tempo that Manu brought."
At 6-foot-6, Ginobili was an incredible athlete who leveraged his size and handle to muscle his way into left-handed driving lanes before using his innovative choreography to snake through opposing bigs on his way to the rim.
"Obviously as a lefty it catches your eye too," Barry said, "and he had the ability that Šarūnas didn't have that could finish with finger rolls or dunk it over the top, or he could extend it around it and spin it in."
Ginobili could decelerate, change directions on a dime and finish at the rim. But his Hall of Fame career also coincided with a revolution in pro basketball.
He arrived in a league controlled by big men such as Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal and Yao Ming, larger-than-life figures who commanded our attention in the low post. By the time Ginobili retired, the league's entire aesthetic had shifted toward a pace-and-space motif dominated by hyperskilled perimeter players such as Stephen Curry, James Harden and Luka Doncic.
Ginobili's strides were equal parts graceful and unpredictable, his ability to decelerate on a dime was world-class, and his finishing package at the rim was both diverse and effective. As Barry says, "Once he got into the paint, Manu had one million ways to [beat] to a center."
Two decades ago, nobody knew Ginobili's signature move would upend the NBA, but that's exactly what has happened.
Nearly 20 years after Ginobili made his NBA debut, the move he showcased in the biggest moments of the biggest games the sport has to offer has become central in the modern NBA. Attacking wings like Ginobili are now among the most coveted stars in the game. Even the league's most dominant interior scorer, Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo -- who was a 9-year-old in Athens when Ginobili scored the biggest triumph of his career there at the 2004 Olympics -- rarely posts up on the blocks. He muscles his way into driving lanes, then uses driving rim attacks and the move with the most swag in basketball right now to get his layups and dunks.
The heart of the Spurs
People around the Spurs know how fortunate they were. The combination of Duncan, Ginobili and Tony Parker was an embarrassment of riches, but while Duncan will go down in history as the most talented of the trio, his relatively reserved demeanor opened the door for Ginobili to emerge as the heart of a dynasty.
"He was more demonstrative than Tim," Barry said. "The emotional content of the team ran through him."
During Ginobili's career, the Spurs reached the conference finals seven times, winning five of those series. They'd win four of the five Finals series they played in, with Ginobili averaging 14.0 points -- higher than his career regular-season average -- on the game's biggest stage. But more than his production, Ginobili brought an intensity to help lead the Spurs through the most difficult battles in professional basketball.
"You know those old fire alarms that say, 'In case of emergency break glass,'" Barry said. "For us, Manu was behind the glass. Manu was the guy we leaned on for that. Timmy was greatness personified, but sometimes we needed Manu."
Ginobili had a way of lifting the team when it needed to be lifted, and the team responded in kind. Never was that more evident than in the 2014 Finals. San Antonio had come off a bitter defeat against the Miami Heat the season before, one that Ginobili took particularly hard. His missed free throw with 28 seconds left in regulation in Game 6 opened the door for a Heat comeback, and his turnover with 44 seconds left in overtime denied the Spurs a chance to regain the lead.
Those bad memories had nearly been erased by Game 5 of the 2014 Finals. The Spurs were home in San Antonio, having taken a 3-1 series lead with two of the most dominant performances in Finals history. Still, Miami took an early lead in Game 5 and was hanging around in the second quarter when Ginobili drove the lane and threw down an epic posterizing dunk on Chris Bosh, seemingly ending any chances of a Miami comeback and putting the proverbial nail in the coffin of the "Heatles" era.
It was far from the first time Ginobili rose to the moment with an iconic play, and it wouldn't be the last. In the 2017 Western Conference semifinals, Ginobili -- two months away from his 40th birthday -- sealed the Spurs' Game 5 win against the Houston Rockets with a remarkable come-from-behind blocked shot on James Harden's game-tying 3-point attempt in overtime.
For Barry, Ginobili's ability to thrive in big moments was one of his defining characteristics: "He impacts a locker room. He impacts a gymnasium. He impacts a country."
The ultimate winner
Let's round this out with a simple stat: Out of the 141 players in NBA history who have played at least 1,000 games, nobody has a higher winning percentage than Ginobili, who won a remarkable 72.1% of the NBA games he played in.
Popovich said one key reason for this incredible stat was Ginobili's ability to prioritize team success over individual accolades.
"He's probably the most selfless player I've ever been around in the sense that he's a Hall of Fame player that for a large portion of his career came off of the bench, because I thought we'd have a better chance to win games and win championships if he did that," Popovich said. "There are not too many people that would make that sacrifice."
Ginobili is one of just three players over the 70% mark. The other two happen to be Ginobili's teammates, Duncan and Parker.
It's an incredible marker that proves Ginobili and the Spurs' greatness was both sustained and reliable.
He exited the NBA with an absurd winning percentage, which is especially remarkable given the fact he began his career as a second-round pick who didn't make his NBA debut until three years after his draft night.
However, when the NBA's 75th anniversary team was announced, Ginobili wasn't on the list -- even though it extended to 76 players due to a tie in the voting.
Ginobili's résumé compares nicely with those of many players who made the cut, even if he didn't pile up All-Star appearances. He was by any measure the second-best or third-best player on four championship teams. He was an icon for a franchise that failed to win 50 games just once in his career -- in his final season.
Simply put, Ginobili's legacy checks every box on the greatness checklist. His four rings and winning percentage numbers speak volumes. His signature move legitimately changed the NBA forever. He's one of the most important international players in league history. Yet somehow the league failed to include him on its 75th anniversary team, instead selecting other recent players who can't say any of those things.
But for those who were fortunate to have spent time with him, they all know he's one of the greatest leaders and champions in hoops history, and his incredible résumé is one of the most impressive that basketball has ever seen.
"As a teammate he was superb, as a player he was spectacular," Popovich said, "and one of the most kind and curious people I've ever been around in my entire life."