Hornets season ends

They watched Tim Duncan miss his last 10 shots. They squandered almost all of a 17-point lead in the fourth quarter. They struggled to cope with Jannero Pargo and didn't even shoot 40 percent from the field.
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 how much older they're getting.
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 fast-changing) defenses, 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 17th 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 prototypical performance from the Spurs' Uglyball manual. It was the sort of professional clampdown that will inevitably generate widespread shrugs from folks out there that were smitten by the irresistible Chris Paul and hoping for something different: Namely CP3 dueling Kobe for a spot in the NBA Finals.
Not that the Spurs will take offense. They've come to expect a lack of appreciation for their 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 -- essentially 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.
After all ...
It has taken the Spurs farther than ever before in the chase for back-to-back titles. In each of its previous three attempts to repeat as champions, 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 established them as just the 21st team in league history out of 100 to win a Game 7 on the road ... and most importantly put them in the NBA's Final Four opposite a team which actually presents fewer unfavorable matchups than the Hornets did.
I suppose some of you will want to debate that point about the Lakers, but you can consider the Hornets convinced. On so many fronts, they were shellshocked in the biggest sporting event in this town since the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina struck.
The Spurs made only 30 baskets, but 12 of them were 3-pointers, resulting in a decisive 36-12 advantage when New Orleans could only manage four threes in response.
The three days off between games might have helped the ailing David West (20 points, nine rebounds) and Tyson Chandler (13 points, 15 boards) heal, but it also charged the Spurs with some crucial energy. That led to 51 rebounds for the visitors, including 13 on the offensive end and five of those in a mere seven minutes from Kurt Thomas.
The Hornets found trouble everywhere really. They erased San Antonio's first double-digit lead (36-25), only for the Spurs to scramble it back up to nine at the half thanks to a trademark flurry from Manu Ginobili (26 points). They watched Duncan trudge to the bench with his fourth foul with 4:41 to go in the third quarter, only for San Antonio to expand the lead to its peak (71-54) while Duncan was watching helplessly. They slumped when the Spurs kept making their free throws (19-for-21) and had trouble keeping up when San Antonio's Gregg Popovich -- at his best when it mattered most -- started changing his pick-and-roll coverages more often than most coaches, switching things up every few minutes and then shifting Bruce Bowen onto Pargo late.
Even when New Orleans found something, like Pargo erupting for 16 points in the fourth quarter, there was a downside. Pargo taking 13 of the Hornets' 23 shots in the final period meant that the ball, for long stretches, was not in Paul's hands. Which San Antonio naturally didn't mind on a night that Duncan (16 points, 14 boards) started 5-for-7 from the floor and finished 0-for-10.
The Hornets, though, always knew this was a possibility. It was just a few days, before Game 6, that Byron Scott said he ranks the Duncan-era Spurs with "us, Boston and Chicago," referring to Scott's old Laker teams along with the Larry Bird Celtics and Michael Jordan Bulls. Scott went on to bill San Antonio as "the team of the decade" and openly admits that the Spurs are "what we're trying to emulate."
Said Popovich, responding to one reporter's conclusion that experience had trumped exuberance at the most telling time: "There are no correct answers to that question. They're great questions, but no one will ever know. If New Orleans had won tonight, you'd say it was because of their youth and their athleticism and their fire and all that sort of stuff ... and we would be too old. But since we won, then our experience did it. Who knows? We just played a very good defensive game tonight."
They simply played the Spurs' game, no one more so than Horry. Vilified for his back pick that rattled West's back Thursday night, Horry was suddenly Big Shot Rob again, forgetting that he had made just one 3-pointer in the first six games of this series by draining a couple 3s and skying for a few emphatic rebounds in 14-plus solid minutes.
It might have been just the third Game 7 of Duncan's career and the first roadie of the three, but Horry is now 7-2 in Game 7s, still alive in the quest for his eighth ring in 16 seasons.
"A lot of times people think that since there's no high flyers on this team and that there's no dunks, people think we're old and we can't play," Horry said.
Old?
Yes.
Too stubborn to lose their confidence after three lopsided losses in the same building?
Ditto.
The Spurs were so unflappable, even in their bad stretches, that it hardly seemed like a Game 7 to them.
"Not really, to be honest with you," Parker said. "We felt like we were in control the whole way."