The 1999 NBA Finals may be one of the least remembered, perhaps because of the immediate aftermath of Michael Jordan's sixth ring a year earlier, with that legendary shot in the final seconds to leave a combative Utah Jazz featuring Stockton and Malone unable to answer.
Or, it may be because it came after a truncated season following a lockout. Either way, it was time for new dynasties to pick up the baton from the Bulls, and boy did they -- the 1999 Championship was the first ever taken by Greg Popovich's San Antonio Spurs.
Basketball historians will say that the secret was the Texans' immaculate defense against an attack spearheaded by Allan Houston and Latrell Sprewell, but perhaps it was another.
The cover photo is the champions' plane ride home from New York, after making it a 4-1 series at Madison Square Garden. The NBA trophy is recognizable in the lower right, but surely that's not what catches your attention.
Even after a huge victory, the players are preparing to play StarCraft over LAN.
The real key to the team?
To celebrate the most important basketball title in the world with StarCraft and not champagne and parties, you have to really like the game -- and there's certainly plenty of visual evidence that certain Spurs players had a fever for Blizzard's RTS.
In the video above, which has been doing the rounds on the Internet for a few years, we can see Malik Rose, Sean Elliot and the two superstars of that team -- Tim Duncan and David Robinson. The four are playing games in a hotel room, using a LAN system to connect without the need for a network connection. This is important, since in 1999 the Internet was sparce, much less so on an airplane.
Rose and Duncan, the youngsters in this group of gamers, are facing off in a 2vs2 against Robinson and Elliot. We can quickly appreciate that the level of play is not at all high, especially when we see that they are playing with old trackball mice.
However, that doesn't stop them throwing multiple taunts at one another them, as well as leaving them bothered when they lose.
Tim Duncan, the NBA nerd
These barbs are important, players making use of the chat to mock their rivals, or even the complaints from Elliot that Rose is cheating by looking at his screen. Rose's final explanation is not wasted:
"Tim and myself, we lost to Dave and Sean. But Dave and Sean have the strongest force in the game, although they are expensive. They just beat us. They got the best of us yesterday, and they won the battle, but not the war".
We don't know who had the idea to play these games, but it seems obvious that it could have been Tim Duncan. The recently-inducted Hall of Famer is one of the biggest nerds in NBA history, and is known for his passion for role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and video games like World of Warcraft.
In fact, it is well known that Duncan, years after this StarCraft gathering, had a guild with fellow players Andrei Kirilenko and Channing Frye, and that they played daily until four in the morning.
Perhaps that camaraderie exhibited by that great team had something to do with those StarCraft games in hotels, airplanes, and other places through which the 1999 Spurs passed.
Today, NBA players continue to use video games to relax in their downtime -- but of course, with somewhat more modern equipment.
Original content by José Ángel "Razablan" Mateo.
