“It’s Game 7 and we’re down 15 or so points in the final game” – Tim Duncan on why 2005 title was the hardest of his five originally appeared on Basketball Network.
Tim Duncan won five championships over the course of a 19-year career that reshaped the San Antonio Spurs and redefined the concept of a franchise cornerstone.
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Each ring carried its own weight. The first one, in 1999, confirmed the promise of a generational talent. The 2003 title was a passing of the torch as David Robinson walked away from the game. The 2007 run marked the full maturation of the Spurs dynasty, while 2014 was a poetic redemption.
But of all five banners that rose into the rafters, it’s the 2005 victory over the Detroit Pistons that Duncan calls the hardest and most unforgettable.
A memorable series
Game 7 of the series pushed every player into their absolute physical and mental limits. It was on that stage, in front of a roaring crowd at the SBC Center, that Duncan found himself staring at a scoreboard that tilted in the wrong direction.
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“It’s Game 7 and we’re down 15 or so points in the final game. I won’t say that fear is kicking in, but it’s just the realization that you’ve come this far,” he recalled. “The game setting against Detroit, I’m facing Rasheed [Wallace], [Antonio] McDyess, Ben Wallace — just all these big studs that are athletic and they’re not going to give up.”
By the time the 2005 NBA Finals rolled around, the Spurs were deep into their championship pedigree. They had been here before. So had Detroit. The Pistons had just come off a gritty 2004 title run where they had broken the Lakers’ star-studded machine apart.
Their style was bruising, exacting and unapologetically defensive. Detroit didn’t win games by flash but won by will. And their front line was a wall: Ben Wallace, Rasheed Wallace and Antonio McDyess brought muscle, mobility and defensive terror to every possession.
At halftime in the deciding game, the Spurs trailed by nine. The Pistons had suffocated San Antonio’s rhythm, outmuscling them in the paint and cutting off passing lanes with mechanical precision.
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Duncan had struggled through the first two quarters, shooting just 3-for-10 from the field. He was double-teamed constantly, with McDyess hounding him on the block and Ben rotating over with violent contests.
But something turned in the second half.
Duncan didn’t light up the stat sheet in a traditional sense, his 25 points came on 10-for-27 shooting but every bucket came when the team needed it. He pulled down 11 rebounds, blocked two shots and anchored a defense that shut Detroit down in the closing minutes. He made clutch mid-range bank shots, one over Rasheed that helped erase the final deficit.
The Spurs won 81-74. It was the lowest-scoring Game 7 in NBA Finals history, a grind of a game where each team shot under 43 percent. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the essence of competition.
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Duncan’s fair bite
Game 7s carry a mythology all their own — and for Duncan, that night left a permanent imprint. The pressure wasn’t subtle. It wrapped itself around the arena. Even in the hours before tip-off, the weight of the moment wasn’t lost on him.
“I can remember how it felt going into that Game 7, where they were asking, a reporter was asking before the game, literally asked if ‘you have any fear of this team,'” the Spurs legend said. “I was like, yeah … it was nerve-wracking and obviously it was a lot of fun and it ended great. So probably the most memorable.”
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That version of Detroit was built to be feared. Their starting five had no superstar in the traditional sense, but in unison, they worked like a machine: Chauncey Billups at the helm, Rip Hamilton cutting through defenses with surgical movement, Tayshaun Prince disrupting matchups on the wing and the Wallace duo enforcing the paint.
They’d already toppled a prime Los Angeles Lakers squad in the 2004 Finals and they were minutes away from back-to-back titles. But Duncan’s quiet command, his refusal to be rattled, turned the tide.
He had won before, but never like this, never against a defense that read him like a book, never with his back so close to the wall, never in a series so even that each team won three games apiece before stepping into the last night of the season.
The 2005 Finals were the first to go seven games since 1994 and the only one during Duncan’s title runs. The margin of victory across the seven games was razor-thin, with neither team winning consecutive games until the Spurs closed it out. It was fitting that the Finals MVP went to Duncan, not for flash but for control. His composure became the lever that shifted the series.
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jun 17, 2025, where it first appeared.