Don’t wallow in sorrow for Tim Duncan

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The Duncan-ites of this world are pretty down right now.

We’ve been mopey this whole month, frankly, watching the previously age-defying ‎Tim Duncan — our modern-day Bill Russell — reduced to filling such a miniscule role for the San Antonio Spurs in these playoffs.

The NBA’s corner of the Twitterverse predictably bathed in such sadness late Thursday night, once it started to sink in, before they even got to halftime in Oklahoma City, that we might be watching the final game ‎of Duncan’s Hall of Fame career.

Just try not to wallow for too long.

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1 RelatedYou really shouldn’t stay sad when we A) don’t yet truly know if it’s the end, and B) we’ve been treated to nearly two decades of Duncan’s excellence.

He just turned 40, after all. Now — or soon — we’re going to be powerless to stop him from hanging up that horrendously huge and clunky knee brace which, as longtime Spurs owner Peter Holt told us in 2014, forced Duncan “to change the way he runs.”

Don’t worry, though. This is not how we’re going to remember him.

The Spurs’ six-game collapse to their longtime understudies from Oklahoma City is fresh in the mind at the moment, so you probably can recite depressing stats such as how Duncan’s 19 points in Thursday’s season-ender trumped the 17 points he managed in the first five games of the series. Or how he only played two measly seconds of the fourth quarter in Game 3, inserted just long enough to launch an ambitious cross-court inbounds pass to Kawhi Leonard, as if he were merely a long-throw specialist out of English soccer’s Premier League like we used to see from Rory Delap.

Yet downbeat factoids like those will fade from memory soon enough. You will inevitably remember Duncan as we all should.

As the closest thing to Russell that we’ve ever seen.

After scoring 19 points in what could be his final game, Tim Duncan said he will go “figure out life.” Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images

I remember in February when our #NBARank folks asked me to add some context to Duncan’s placement as the eighth-best player in league history. I said it …

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