San Antonio Spurs: 15 players you may have forgot played in San Antonio
No. 8: Rod Strickland (1990-91 – 1991-92)
Changing tune from players who joined the Spurs during the back-half of their career, we have Rod Strickland, who played three seasons in San Antonio from ages 23 to 25.
Today, Strickland boasts a claim as arguably the NBA’s best player to never make an All-Star Team. His prime — which conveniently came a few seasons after San Antonio — chronicled a six-year stretch in which he averaged 17.7 points, 9.4 assists, and 4.7 rebounds per game, and four playoff appearances over that run. Raw numbers don’t quite do it justice; his seminal work as an attack-first-ask-questions-later influenced what we see from today’s guards, such as his god-son, Kyrie Irving.
A week after the All-Star Weekend in 1990, the Spurs began a youth movement, dealing 33-year-old floor general Maurice Cheeks to the New York Knicks. The wheels for a Cheeks move were always in motion, in more ways than one. He preferred to live on the East Coast so badly, that instead of buying a house in San Antonio, he chose to simply live in a Holiday Inn.
Strickland, by then just an unproven All-Rookie Second Teamer out of DePaul, was looking to shed labels of his chronic tardiness and moodiness. He lost the starting point guard job to Mark Jackson, before going to San Antonio to start, as well as put up then-career highs in points (13.8), assists (8.6), rebounds (4.6), and field-goal percentage (48.2 percent) over the next two seasons.
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All of that productivity would be marred by a bad pass at the tail end of the 1990 Western Conference Semifinals against his future team, the Portland Trail Blazers. With the score knotted at 103 apiece, the Spurs circled the ball around the perimeter. Strickland got too fancy, putting too much mustard on a behind-the-back pass attempt to Sean Elliott that ended the San Antonio Spurs’ season in 108-105 fashion, a Game 7 loss.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the Strickland-Spurs partnership had peaked. Strickland suffered the first of multiple incidents, this one leaving him with a broken hand.
Sun-Sentinel described a “bitter, two-month contract holdout” left Strickland unloved in San Antonio, and despite later success, his Spurs run was quite foreshadowing to his overall legacy — seldom discussed, especially for the good.