We lost basketball royalty on Monday with legendary San Antonio Spur Tim Duncan officially announcing his retirement after an unforgettable 19-year career. With Duncan’s NBA tenure now an object of the past, regret is beginning to set in for those players who weren’t lucky enough to call themselves Duncan’s teammate. One such case is retired point guard and current Bucks head coach Jason Kidd.
After Milwaukee’s Summer League game on Monday, the 43-year-old Kidd said that he still has nightmares about a missed opportunity in his playing days to team up with Duncan and the Spurs in 2003.
Kidd was a free agent that year and came dangerously close to signing with San Antonio, even going so far as to tell the team that he would, in fact, be joining them.
“I thought I was going to be a Spur,” Kidd said per Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN. “I committed when I was down there on my visit [to San Antonio].
“On my flight home, I think I got cold feet,” he continued. “And sometimes I have nightmares about that. Maybe I could have won a championship or two there. But I got really lucky with Dallas and won a championship.
“It is something that I sometimes regret,” Kidd concluded. “I wanted to see if I could win a championship in San Antonio. When you talk about Duncan, you can’t say that I got cheated [out of MVP in 2001-02]. Just coming second to him was an honor in itself. The biggest disappointment is maybe not joining him, joining San Antonio and trying to win a championship when I had the opportunity as a free agent.”
The 10-time All-Star point guard would ultimately sign a six-year, $103 million deal to remain with the New Jersey Nets, with whom he had just made back-to-back NBA Finals appearances, but Kidd never made it past the second round in New Jersey again. He was traded to Dallas in 2008 and won his lone NBA championship with the Mavericks in 2011 before retiring in 2013.
The Spurs, meanwhile, would go on to win three more championships with Duncan as Tony Parker manned the point instead. But it’s madness to think that they had the chance to add a prime Kidd, an unselfish player who would have fit seamlessly into their culture, into the mix and have him run high screen-and-rolls with a prime Duncan for years on end. Now all we are left to do is wonder what might have been and how many more rings San Antonio might have won had one of the all-time great floor generals ultimately chosen to be a Spur.
