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Tony Parker is the San Antonio Spurs’ best player. His hamstring, which may or may not have sustained any structural damage, nevertheless has his status for Game 4 up in the air. [UPDATE: Parker said late this morning he’s "ready to go."] This would have any other team waiting on tenterhooks. But in Game 3’s tit-for-tat blowout of the Heat, Parker scored only six points in 27 minutes, despite dishing out eight assists. Yet in his absence, the Spurs were never more Tony Parker’s team.

As a dynasty that moves at its own pace, imperceptible and mighty like the geothermal boogie beneath us, the Spurs are a truism. How many titles have they won? Who knows. Somewhere between two and six. That stuff about playing the Right Way is less about what they do and more about where it leads. That’s why, even as they have morphed from the snooze-inducing Twin Towers of Duncan and Robinson to today’s Parker-lead small ball and ornate ecutions, the Spurs face the criticism of being boring.

Yet they are less boring than they are inevitable. When they don’t enter the playoffs at the top of the West, they’re the team nobody wants to face. The way they’re playing in this postseason is hardly staid. But it’s the Spurs.

That’s why the Tony Parker miracle shot at the end of Game 1 could feel like a smart basketball play even as he lost his balance and nearly lost the ball. Parker got swallowed up by one of the league’s best defenses, a wholly understandable turn of events. What happened next—the calm admission of imperfection and the instantaneous ability to adapt to it—was late-game heroics made Spurs-ian in a whole new way. In the first quarter of Game 3, Parker again got trapped in the paint; he nearly repeated the Game 1 move, as if it that had been rough notes for a future performance, except this time around the clock allowed him to kick it out to the open man. Are miracles just a matter of context or are we numb to them if they’re happening all around? That’s quite the philosophical bind and merrily, the real riddle of the Spurs.

Are today’s Spurs more exciting than in the past, or somehow more boring for making a dynamic style into something so rational, so lacking in ecstasy? In some ways, that’s the parable of Manu and Parker’s careers. Parker’s season isn’t a sea change in the Spurs’ philosophy, he’s an expansion of it. At the same time, the Spurs find ways to invigorate almost breathlessly technical basketball. Team basketball in this series—from both the Heat and the Spurs—has been on display in the most flattering way possible. It’s not jazzy interplay, sure, but watching San Antonio move the ball and manufacture points has become its own kind of flourish. If Parker and Manu are swagger subsumed, they also have fed the formerly dry style of play, taking it somewhere surprising. Team can be about larger-than-life individuals feeding off of each other; it can be all about form and function. San Antonio always has been somewhere in between the two.