Donde Ginóbili va, la legión extranjera sigue

By HARVEY ARATON Published: June 13, 2005

UNLIKELY a development as it is, Manu Ginóbili needn't score another point or pilfer another pass in the N.B.A finals to remain a legend in the mind of Carlos Delfino.

From where Delfino sits, in street clothes at the end of the Detroit bench, Ginóbili is a whirling, bruising, levitating go-to god of the game. Like Mike is Manu.

"He is someone everyone who loves or plays basketball in Argentina is looking at," Delfino said before Ginóbili picked up in the first quarter last night where he left off in the fourth quarter of Game 1, launching the Spurs to a 97-76 victory and a 2-0 finals lead last night at the SBC Center. "Because he has been the main guy for the national team, the gold medal in the Olympics, people are following him in the newspapers, wherever he goes."

Exhibit A is the path Delfino, 22, took to his rookie season in Detroit: he left Argentina in 2000 to play in Italy for Reggio Calabria, the team Ginóbili had just departed. Two years later, Delfino moved on to Bologna, where Ginóbili was probably the best player in Europe.

"And just when I got there, Manu came here," said Delfino, who, like Ginóbili, is a 6-foot-6 guard.

As an N.B.A. rookie, in a supporting role to Tim Duncan, Ginóbili won a championship ring. Delfino, while on the injured list, was hoping to become the second Argentine player to flash the jewelry, but Ginóbili is crashing the dream by certifying himself as Duncan's co-star and an irresistible force of nature in the minds of the American audience, the way he is in Delfino's.

"The guys - even Coach Larry - ask me, 'How do you guard him?' " Delfino said. "It's not easy, because Manu is so creative, so unpredictable."

Already there are backroom suggestions - whispered, so as not to be construed as un-American - that Ginóbili is at least as desirable a commodity as the likes of Kobe Bryant. "Anybody that's watched the playoffs would look at Ginóbili and say, you know, they should be talking about Ginóbili like everybody who is talking about Dwyane Wade," Pistons Coach Larry Brown said.

Brown, a clever man, perhaps was calculating that the burden of heightened individual expectation might be of valuable defensive assistance. Ginóbili , a wily southpaw, countered, "I don't think I am so impossible to guard." Then he went out in the first quarter last night and spread himself across the box score like Mr. Fantastic.

A 3-point shot from the left wing to open the scoring. Penetration off the dribble against Tayshaun Prince for a kickout to Bruce Bowen for another 3. A steal and soft lead pass to Tony Parker for a fast-break basket. Boxing out Prince for an offensive rebound foul. A lefty flip to Nazr Mohammed on a pick-and-roll for a drive and conventional 3-point play.

By the end of the third quarter, Ginóbili had not missed a shot and had made all four of his 3's. When the Pistons rallied from 23 points down to within 8 in the fourth quarter, Ginóbili hit two free throws, made a lunging steal, penetrated and hit Bowen for a backbreaking 3-pointer. After Game 1, Ginóbili said, "I am not going to score 26 points every game." He was right.

He had 27 last night, 7 assists and a hand in too many hustle plays to count. Prince, the man he started out guarding, had more fouls, 4, than points, 3. The love affair with Ginóbili's adopted American city, steamy San Antonio, continued.

Here, his shaggy-haired image is everywhere. Black Spurs jerseys and shirts with his name on the back dangle from racks in even greater numbers than for the soft-spoken Duncan, who generally eschews attention. It makes sense that San Antonio, with its large Mexican influence, would take to a South American player whose first language is Spanish, but what about the rest of this huge country, which so often yawns when pitched a player with an unfamiliar passport?

By virtue of a hybrid game that mixes jaw-dropping athleticism with a journeyman's work ethic, speculation abounds that Ginóbili, the recent ESPN the Magazine cover boy, can be the first foreign-born player to get the hardcore sell. But can the N.B.A., with its television ratings sagging, rebuild its fan base, in part with imported goods?

While the league resorted yesterday to bragging about how Game 1 television ratings bettered the 2003 Spurs-Nets series (and apparently any 1950's series, including Rochester and Syracuse), we could be missing a bigger global picture: the N.B.A. also claimed roughly 10 times the Game 1 viewers worldwide as the 11 million it counted in the United States. There's no place like home, but appraising the business solely from the American vantage point may be shortsighted, given the likelihood of many more foreign players following their heroes here, as Delfino has Ginóbili.

According to Brown, Delfino could already start on several N.B.A. teams. His Olympic teammate Andres Nocioni is a valuable contributor in Chicago. Next year, the Spurs are hoping to have the Argentine forward Luis Scola, whose draft rights they hold, and also have their eye on another Argentine, Fabricio Oberto.

Asked if the growing Argentine presence is a validation of the Olympic gold, Ginóbili said: "I don't think that the national team bases its success on individuals. I think it's an example of how to play like a team, behave like a team, help each other out even if you have that kind of talent."

Two games from the title, he might as well have been talking about the Spurs.