My Favorite Player: Manu Ginobili

Editor’s note: This week, The Athletic’s writers are offering essays on some of their favorite athletes. Read more of them here.

Manu Ginobili was anything and everything. Few players have achieved every single one of their career goals; even fewer still embodied the entire spectrum of basketball like the Spurs legend.

He was a man who fit any role and became whomever he needed to be to match whatever the moment called for. Ginobili was a graceful ballerina one second, the Tasmanian Devil the next. He was an untrackable shooting guard, a bulldozing small forward and a puppet master point guard. Ginobili was relegated to being the sixth man, yet in that role was often the Spurs’ most important player in crunchtime in some of the biggest games in recent history.

He was not the greatest in any one area, save for maybe being the all-time leader in audacity. The irony was that he played his entire career for Gregg Popovich, who achieved coaching nirvana by getting players to maximize their talents within a carefully curated role. Perhaps the glue that held it all together was Ginobili’s reckless ambition, his ability and his relentless desire to do every single thing on the court.

Ginobili was the most unpredictable player of my lifetime and played with the beauty and brilliance that made him my basketball soulmate. He took the game I loved and taught me how to appreciate it in ways I had never understood before.

Ginobili’s contributions helped shape today’s style of play in lasting ways. He perfected the Euro step, which has become the defining move of the contemporary game. The move was first introduced by Elgin Baylor in the late 1960s and was dusted off from time to time by Julius Erving. It wasn’t until Sarunas Marciulionis brought it over in the late ’90s that the step-through move was dubbed the Euro step and became formally recognized as a move in its own right.

But Ginobili took it to another level, using it as more than a tool to get by a defender trying to take a charge. He turned the move into an unpredictable playmaking tool, whether he was using it to snake through a trap or to decelerate and find an open shooter in the corner. Ginobili took the template of Marciulionis’ game and gave it even more panache and explosiveness. Much like Diego Maradona before him and Lionel Messi after, he hails from a lineage of Argentine athletes who move with an incredible balance that makes every single step part of an unfolding mystery, no one but the player himself certain of where he will move next. Ginobili changed speeds and direction with such frequency and erraticism that guarding him was one of the great mental challenges in NBA history.

Then there was the stepback 3. He certainly didn’t invent it, but he deserves a large portion of the credit for bringing the shot to where it is now. He perfected the technique of timing his shoulder dig into the defender with a slight push on the hip and a deep sidestep to get from midrange to behind the arc. He mastered that hop into his back foot and the sliding of his front foot underneath himself as he set up the shot, always keeping his hips at the proper angle as he handled the ball so that he was already lined up when he stepped into the shot.

His shooting technique itself was always fascinating. He was one of the rare shooters who could catch the ball up by their forehead and release it without bringing it back down. Because of this, he hit more tightly contested clutch 3s than almost anyone else in his time in the league. It was a perfect fit for a Spurs offense that always looked to make that extra pass late in the clock.

Ginobili had a low set point, down in front of his forehead, but he kept his elbow down and bent his wrist deeper than almost anyone besides Larry Bird. It was fitting he bore that similarity to Bird, as he played almost like a guard version of the Celtics star, from his brilliant touch to his delicate footwork and daring flair. No player has quite matched Bird stylistically and skill-wise like Ginobili.

There was the Spurs Hammer play, in which Ginobili drives baseline and then whips a crosscourt pass to a shooter in the opposite corner. It has since become a staple in playbooks across the league, but at its introduction, Ginobili was one of the few wings who had the yo-yo ball control and could fire a one-handed fastball across the court off the live dribble.

He loved when teams would trap him on the pick-and-roll, as he would slowly drag them out, wait for the big man to open his stance toward him and then carefully bounce a pass right through his legs. Defenders were walking on eggshells when he had the ball, never certain whether he was about to show them the truth or a lie with his feet and the ball.

He always sold his fakes with such conviction, pushing the ball as far into a shot or pass as possible. Ginobili was one of the few players of each generation who understood how in the heat of the moment, every defender reacts to the offensive player showing the ball, no matter how disciplined they might be. He would extend shot fakes until his elbows nearly straightened, even throwing his head back to give it that extra sell. He would push pass fakes all the way from his chest until the defender would open their hips and open up the lane. He had every subtle head or hip movement in the book too, with footwork that could teleport him from one side of the paint to the other on a Euro step. He was as hard to read as he was to contain.

It was by no means random coincidence that Ginobili is the only player in NBA history to snatch a bat out of midair on the court.

🦇10 years from the bat incident🦇
Nothing I did on the court draw more attention than this! The bat survived and flew away while I had to get multiple vaccinations. Not fun at all. Happy Halloween! https://t.co/OB87uuIzti

— Manu Ginobili (@manuginobili) November 1, 2019

He was the ultimate competitor, as his coach would always say. Tim Duncan credited Ginobili for having the confidence to see an impossible situation and say to himself he was the only one who could try to conquer it. It was that irrational confidence that so often got him into a position to succeed. He would drive through the teeth of the defense and curl his hand over the ball like a running back hitting the hole, only to emerge on the other end with a bank shot high off the glass.

Ginobili would even put himself into compromising situations just to make the bigger play that nobody envisioned. There was no greater example of this than when he was guarding James Harden on the final play of overtime in a decisive Game 5 of the 2017 Western Conference semifinals. Harden used an up fake to drive right and believed he saw enough daylight to get the shot off.

Not quite. Rather than trying to slip back in front of him and risk the foul, Ginobili brilliantly let Harden drive in front of him, jumped early with his hand out and stuffed the shot from behind for the win and the series lead.

Manu Ginobili with the clutch block! 👀#PhantomCam 🎥 #GoSpursGo pic.twitter.com/i0GYIfobj4

— NBA UK (@NBAUK) May 10, 2017

It was fitting to see Ginobili stuffing the man who was his heir apparent and evolutionary descendant as a combo guard. Ginobili was considered a point forward in his time, but Harden evolved into a full-on point guard using the same stylistic concepts. While Harden has scaled the Ginobili model to an unprecedented level of usage and efficiency, what made Ginobili special was that he did it all on both ends in every way possible. While he had his consistent characteristics and mannerisms, he was unique in that he was a chameleon and could change his form and approach to fit the matchup or moment.

He was the forefather in so many ways of the game’s newly dawning era, in which point guards are increasingly used as off-ball shooters and wings run pick-and-roll offense. LeBron James made it appear as though only the most gifted and brilliant athletes were capable of filling that role. Ginobili humanized it.

Argentina shocked the world when it beat Team USA in Athens at the 2004 Olympic semifinals, with who else but Ginobili leading the way with 29 points. His international accomplishments were impressive, but Ginobili’s defining moments came on the NBA stage, especially in 2013 and 2014, as he helped lead a Spurs offense that was one of the most perfectly executed egalitarian systems in the history of the game. The irony was that while they won in 2014, the 2013 Spurs might have been the best team of their generation. While Ginobili was generally considered deserving of Finals MVP in 2005 for his performance against the historically great Ben Wallace Pistons defense, the Heat teams he went up against were some of the greatest ever assembled.

Before the Stephen Curry Warriors pushed the superteam concept to another level, the LeBron James Heat teams were on a level comparable to the ’96 Bulls, ’87 Lakers, ’86 Celtics and other elite modern champions. Yet the Spurs took them down to the wire in ’13 and vanquished them with ease the next year. Ginobili did it all in those series.

In the first matchup, he was brilliant guarding Dwyane Wade. He was graceful as he cut off of Duncan post-ups, moving as if he wasn’t in his mid-30s. He buried 3s with defenders in his eye. If he had better controlled his series-high 22 turnovers, maybe things would have swung the other way.

But the next year was his magnum opus, with a 14-point first half in a clinching Game 5 that included his iconic poster on Chris Bosh.

Ginobili will undoubtedly enter the Hall of Fame in 2022, which will likely be a polarizing decision years from now when future generations look back at his stats and wonder why a sixth man who never averaged 20 points per game is in the Hall. While the easy answer is that his international career combined with his NBA career is enough to get him in, the long answer is that he was a trailblazer who could have averaged 25 points and 10 assists on a lesser team that handed him the ball full time. But he never sought a bigger role elsewhere, and he committed his entire career to being a key cog in one of the greatest basketball machines ever to exist.

Those of us who were lucky enough to witness his growth and dominance never needed to see the stats to feel his impact. He impacted the game in more areas than almost any player of his lifetime. Ginobili helped influence a style of play that has brought forth a second golden age in the NBA. Just like his time on the court, his impact on the sport will forever reach beyond what can be easily quantified.

(Photo of the 2013 finals: Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)