SAN ANTONIO—Returning to the organization in an official capacity for the first time since his 2016 retirement, former NBA star Tim Duncan was reportedly embarking on a large-scale project Wednesday mapping out the San Antonio Spurs’ genealogy after being hired as the team archivist. “We’re thrilled to have Tim back in the fold, and were happy to honor his request by bringing him on as the Spurs’ head archivist—there’s no one better suited than Tim to chronicle the team’s history, trace players’ lineage, and document important items from our past,” said head coach Gregg Popovich, showing reporters the massive genealogical chart Duncan had created for each of the Spurs’ players mapping not only their personal ancestry and NBA career but also tracking the development of their individual playing style and charting their closest statistical comparisons to previous players going back to college basketball games in the early 1900s. “He’s really jumped right in—he asked if he could set up an office in the AT&T Center catacombs, which we didn’t even know were there, so we let him go right ahead. Of course, he already knew a lot of the team’s Xs and Os from his work cataloguing the evolution of the Spurs offense, and once he finishes digitizing them it’s going to be quite the resource for our staff and younger guys. He’s planning to set up a playbook library and a museum for displaying artifacts from the time when the organization was known as the Dallas Chaparrals—he apparently had a number of them in his private collection already. We think he’ll be a great fit.” Reached for comment, Duncan said he was also putting out a request for players’ diary entries, NBA game logs, and other materials that would help him on his long-term project to publish a history of the Western Conference.

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