Remembering Manu Ginobili, a completely modern player before his time

Last off-season, I spent the entirety of my basketball life working on a mini-series called “Blazing the Trail.” In that series, we focused on 10 players with skill sets that made them ahead of their time. Guys like Rashard Lewis, Reggie Miller, and Chauncey Billups were all subjects of analysis.

However, one notable omission was Argentina’s Flying Man, Manu Ginobili. The reason for this was that his progressiveness was too expansive to fit neatly into a single chapter. Where the players I alluded to earlier all had specific skills/attributes that made them revolutionary, Ginobili’s entire game was ahead of his time. In a sense, he was a completely modern player.

Let’s start with his offense. Ginobili was a dependent scorer but not in the traditional sense. He didn’t lean on his teammates to create open looks for him like he was a guard-sized Clint Capela. No, no, Ginobili’s scoring (and playmaking) was solely reliant on what the defense was doing. You see, Ginobili was a precursor to the read-and-react movement that now occupies the NBA landscape.

Take this play, for instance:

Teammate Tim Duncan comes up to initiate a side pick-and-roll. However, Ginobili notices Pau Gasol is cheating over to hedge, so he rejects the screen and attacks baseline. As he attacks toward the rim, he notices the defense collapsing in front of him and turns to his patented euro-step (a move he popularized) to avoid traffic before kicking the ball out to a wide-open Brent Barry (a career 40.5 percent three-point shooter).

Ginobili was a master of interpreting the defense’s movements and quickly selecting the perfect counter for each coverage. And there are two main reasons for that.

First, Ginobili could read the game quickly because he thought the game quickly. The San Antonio Spurs didn’t integrate a full-fledged .5 offense until the mid-2010s (aka The Beautiful Game Spurs), but Ginobili was making half-second decisions long before then.

In the first clip, Tony Parker unloads the ball after drawing a second defender, and Ginobili immediately responds by ricocheting the Spalding over to the rolling Duncan. And in the second clip, the ball appears to be heading out of bounds off a Spurs miss, and Ginobili not only saves it, but he has the presence of mind to shovel it over to DeJuan Blair (remember that guy) for an easy layup.

With that said, being able to read the game is only half the equation. Once you’ve figured out what the defense is doing, you need to have the capacity to do something about it. You need to be able to react to the situation. And the reason Ginobili could react to any situation is because he was so skilled.

If the defense hedged, he could reject the screen (like the clip above) or split it (first clip in the montage below). If the defense played him in a deep drop, he could burn them…