Skip to footer

Spurs and Thunder star in NBA’s Western Conference Finals: 10 extra dimensions

The clash of the Spurs and Thunder in the NBA’s Western Conference finals may fly a bit under the national radar when it opens Sunday. Here are 10 factors that make this showdown intriguing.

8. International connections

  • By Ross Atkin Staff

The globalization of the NBA will be on prominent display in the Western Conference Finals. The Spurs have perhaps the league’s most international roster, with six non-US players – two Frenchmen (Parker and  Boris Diaw) one Argentinian (Ginobli), one Brazilian (Tiago Splitter), one Canadian (Cory Joseph), and one Australian (Patty Mills).  Even Duncan wasn’t born in any of the 50 states, but in the US Virgin Islands, where he aspired to be an Olympic swimmer until the territory lost its lone swimming pool to hurricane Hugo.

As an added international bonus, consider that Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, whose parents are of Serbian and Croatian descent, has a degree in Soviet studies from the US Air Force Academy.

The Thunder can hardly match this sort of Whole Earth undercurrent, but they don’t strictly bear a “Made in the USA” label either.  Serge Ibaka is from the Republic of Congo and Thabo Sefolosha from Switzerland.

8 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.