There are a multitude of reasons why the San Antonio Spurs are having an especially excellent reason.

Gregg Popovich may have hit on one of the biggest ones when he mentioned post-game that this season comes off a rare offseason where the three best players on the Spurs did not log major summer minutes playing international basketball for their countries.

In most summers, the Spurs stood out among the NBA’s elite by having a core who all played in tournaments (particularly the FIBA World Championships and the Olympics) despite playing deep into the postseason year after year. In fact, this may have actually been a major factor in the seemingly annual tradition of the Spurs catching fire later in the season as opposed to the beginning like some other teams. Considering San Antonio was one game away from their third different winning streak of 10+ games before the All-Star break, the legacy of the late Spurs run could have been more circumstance than previously thought.

This run has also been fueled by an amazingly lucky stretch in terms of injuries to their principal players.

As came up during post-game interviews, the Spurs are the only team in the NBA that has played the same starting lineup every single game. Beyond the obvious fact that having the starters on the floor typically means that a team can play better quality players a higher proportion of the game, one of the other major impacts of that kind of health is the effect it has on the bench. Reliability at the top of the rotation allows any coach (and especially a coach as good and diligent as Popovich at minute distribution) to give their role players more consistent niches and logical sub patterns.

After the game, I asked Tim Duncan whether that consistency had helped the bench and he agreed, noting that the team was still looking to “find guys who can contribute,” giving the feeling that this team could end up being even deeper as players establish themselves.

Those benefits help keep the Spurs fresh each year and give them a buffer for when things like Tim Duncan’s thankfully less catastrophic than it looked injury happen, as they will for each and every team down the road.

The Warriors are one of many teams that has battled through injuries and inconsistency at each level of the rotation, which has had numerous effects from top to bottom. Even as the team has grappled with Andris Biedrins’ apparent lack of progress, the fact of the matter remains that the team does not have a guy who properly complements what David Lee brings to the table, at least until Ekpe Udoh becomes a player capable of bigger minutes. When a team needs to rely on Dan Gadzuric and Acie Law, there are clearly holes that need to be filled.

That point brings to mind the second major discrepancy between the benches of San Antonio and Golden State: the talent. Having excellent ownership and management has yielded major dividends for the Spurs throughout the last decade. The team has had consistency at the top from the coach and a stable of star talent, yet RC Buford and the rest of the staff deserves a ton of credit for keeping the talent level surrounding Duncan and company insanely high, especially for a small market team.

It makes sense for Keith Smart to be more reticent to sit his starters since he cannot call on guys like Antonio McDyess and George Hill to keep the heat up on the opposition. While Popovich deserves a ton of credit for doing all the work he does in terms of rotations and keeping his guys fresh, having a fully stocked cupboard for such a long time has made those decisions more palatable.

The other lingering question is whether having a deeper bench would matter that much in terms of the starters’ minutes. In economics, a situation referred to as the “tragedy of the commons” describes situations where a suboptimal outcome emerges since none of the decision-makers have an incentive to make the smart long-term choice.

In the Warriors’ circumstance, this stems from Keith Smart needing to make his impact in the win/loss column this season either to prove himself to the new ownership or to boost his resume for a future coaching job. In a way, it becomes a chicken or egg situation since Smart needs to play his best players in order to win and is buoyed by the fact that the team does not have adequate backups anyway.

Either way, there should be a line in the sand between giving Monta Ellis, Dorell Wright, Stephen Curry and David Lee heavy minutes in games still in the balance and having them play when things are out of hand. At some point, a coach has to be willing to move on to the next game and eliminate the chance that a key player gets hurt in meaningless minutes, as nearly happened to Ellis against Sacramento. After all, these guys play enough minutes in the times when the results are still to be determined to put them high on the minutes played rankings.