By Marc Stein ESPN.com
NEW ORLEANS -- They watched Tim Duncan clank his last 10 shots. They squandered almost all of a 17-point lead in the fourth quarter. They didn't even shoot 40 percent from the floor.
You hear all that and you are bound to wonder how the San Antonio Spurs managed to win the first Game 7 on the road of the Duncan Era.
Then you remember: It's the Spurs, silly.
They're getting older, true, but the upside there is that advancing age might make them even more stubborn. Too stubborn to realize that they're getting older.
It's a theory that made as much sense as anything Monday night, when San Antonio kept grinding through every blip -- as usual -- while also hitting the Hornets with a devastating mix of smothering (and confusing) defense, killer threes sprinkled in among those many misses and copious doses of the savvy we were expecting from the defending champs in at least one of their three previous visits to New Orleans Arena.
In other words ...
The Spurs were the Spurs.
Finally.
It took until the final game and 16th day of this second-round series for the heartbroken locals to get their first glimpse of them, but the execution masters from the Alamo City duly arrived for this Game 7, snuffing out the Hornets and their storybook season with a 91-82 victory that sends San Antonio into a Western Conference finals showdown with old friends Kobe Bryant, Derek Fisher and Phil Jackson.
It was a prototype performance from the Spurs' Uglyball manual, which almost guarantees that it will elicit many shrugs from folks out there who were smitten by the irresistible Chris Paul and hoping for something different: CP3 dueling Kobe for a spot in the NBA Finals, namely.
Not that the Spurs will take offense. They've come to expect a lack of appreciation for that trademark execution ... and it has to be noted that even they were shrugging.
The turnaround witnessed in Game 7 isn't nearly as blasé as the Spurs made it sound -- given how punchless they were in their three blowout losses here and how unreservedly dreadful they were in the three previous third quarters here -- but you scarcely saw a smile from a Spur when it was all over. There were few hugs or high fives or even joyful sighs of relief.
"We haven't done anything," Spurs forward Robert Horry explained. "What did we do? We didn't win a championship."
Added Tony Parker: "It's a great win, don't get me wrong. But I don't think we're going to celebrate because we're in the conference finals."
Perhaps not. Yet you could nonetheless argue that the victory -- virtually sealed by a huge late jumper from Parker after Jannero Pargo missed a potential game-tying triple from the corner -- was among the most significant in franchise history.
It has taken the Spurs farther than ever before in the chase for back-to-back titles. In each of its previous four attempts to repeat, Team Duncan didn't make it out of the second round.
The win also sealed the Spurs' first-ever comebacks from series deficits of 2-0 and 3-2 ... and put them in the NBA's Final Four opposite a team which actually presents fewer unfavorable matchups than the Hornets did.
Seriously.
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