“The Duncan thing.”

That’s what Joey Crawford called the 2007 incident, last week, in a video interview.

The Duncan thing nearly ended Crawford’s career. It also forced the longtime NBA official to take stock of his life.

Crawford came through it. And now with an aging knee, his long career nearing an end on his terms, ranked as one of his profession’s best, he isn’t Tim Duncan’s adversary anymore.

Crawford is similar to him.

Crawford has said he is “pretty sure” this season will be his last, but he’s as uncommitted as Duncan has been. Asked when he might retire, Crawford has said what Duncan has said.

“As long as my legs hold up.”

At 64, the legs sometimes buckle. One did last season, when a knee went out, and Doc Rivers had to help Crawford get to the bench to sit down.

“I was worried,” Rivers said then. “You don’t want to lose Joey. I can tell you that.”

Rivers was being smart; getting on the good side of the referees is never a bad move. But Rivers was also furthering what many have thought for years, that for all of Crawford’s showmanship, he’s been one of the NBA’s best referees.

A video interview released last week on NBA.com was a tribute to that. It told of Crawford entering the NBA about the same time the Spurs franchise did. To augment a $16,000 annual salary, he delivered mail.

He put a stamp on his work with certainty and the toughness required to counter the home crowd. That style fit with his role models of an earlier era. Refs such as Earl Strom didn’t call a game; it was their game.

Crawford ran his accordingly, and he didn’t mind the back and forth. One clip in the video with Gregg Popovich shows that. When Popovich questions him, and Crawford explains what he thought he had seen, Crawford says, without sarcasm, “You could be right.”

Crawford had comedic flair, too. Last March he leaped into the air to prevent Chicago’s Nikola Mirotic from shooting a free throw, and his exaggerated motions became famous enough to warrant something usually reserved for players. Brandon Armstrong, who has impersonated everyone from Kobe Bryant to Manu Ginobili, did Crawford.

“What are you so happy for?” Armstrong barks before issuing a technical foul.

Crawford’s barking could be excessive. He broke a finger while signaling a tech. And just last June, working his 50th Finals game, he earned another fine for telling Cleveland’s Timofey Mosgov to “shut up.”

“My father was an aggressive guy,” Crawford said. “That was my style. Bad part is, I’ve had some hiccups. I had to fight it.”

Then, in the video, he brought up “the Duncan thing.”

It wasn’t just another Joey moment. He ejected Duncan for laughing on the bench at the end of the 2007 regular season. While Duncan was fined, the NBA suspended Crawford for the rest of the season.

He defended his actions at the time. And in an email Crawford wrote to a news organization then, he intimated he had worked his last game.

“Please do not be sad for me,” Crawford wrote. “I have had a great run and a great career and nobody will ever take that from me.”

But he came back the next season. And three years ago, in the New York Times, Crawford framed that time using the same phrase he used last week:

“The Duncan thing probably changed my life. It was just — you come to the realization that maybe the way you’ve been doing things is not the proper way and you have to regroup, not only on the court but off the court.”

It’s this self-evaluation that likely saved his career. Jake O’Donnell, an official who Crawford called “a legend” in the same Times article, was previously pulled down by a similar spat with Clyde Drexler.

Crawford has since seen a sports psychologist. And in finding “other avenues of dealing with conflict,” Crawford has kept doing what he wanted to do since he was 13 years old.

That didn’t affect Duncan. He’s won games with Crawford, and he’s lost games with him. Had Crawford never officiated in the NBA, Duncan would have had the same career.

But to a short, bald man, there is a tie to a giant of the game. Crawford rose to the top of his profession, too, and he stayed there with the same, remarkable longevity.

Duncan played in two Finals Game 7s, and Crawford has worked three of them. And asked last week about these moments, Crawford’s voice rose.

“When that game is over,” he said, “and no one is talking about you, WOOO, you are the happiest person in the world.”

Maybe they get together for another this June. On the opening tip of his final game, Crawford would toss the basketball in the air, and Duncan would be there to reach for it.

Both would then run, sometimes favoring their bad knees, always serious and sweating. Maybe, as a salute to the past, Crawford would snarl, and Duncan would stare back with eyes wide.

And what if both walked away from the game that night for good, one heading to a final championship celebration, the other to a hotel bar for the last call of a 39-year career?

Tim and Joey, far apart before, would be the same. Smiling.

bharvey@express-news.net

Twitter: Buck_SA