Stop fawning over the Warriors. The Spurs are way more impressive.

The Golden State Warriors have entered the pantheon of all-time elite NBA teams, having broken the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls' record of 72 regular season wins by finishing the season 73-9.

Which team's legacy is the most impressive? Stephen Curry's Warriors — young, fast, dominant, and poised to follow-up on last year's championship win — or Michael Jordan's Bulls, who won their fourth of six championships during that record-setting season? Everyone wants to know!

But here's the thing: This entire thought experiment is a fallacy, largely because teams from different eras literally played under different rules. The NBA today is not the same as it was in Jordan's day. Comparing today's Warriors to the '90s Bulls is as ludicrous as comparing MJ's Bulls to, say, Bill Russell's dominant Celtics of the 1960s.

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So instead, why not compare the Warriors to the other all-time elite team playing right now? I am, of course, talking about the San Antonio Spurs, whose 67-15 record puts them in a tie for the seventh best regular season finish ever.

The Spurs are clearly Golden State's prime competition for this year's Larry O'Brien Trophy. And they've achieved a mind-bogglingly extended run of greatness, the kind that was said to be impossible in the era of the air-tight NBA salary cap.

The five rings they've earned from 1999 to 2014, all with the same coach (Gregg Popovich) and stalwart big man (Tim Duncan), represents nearly unprecedented dominance (Russell's Celtics, Magic's Lakers, and Jordan's Bulls being the only other examples of such sustained success). The Spurs were five seconds away from yet another championship in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, before Ray Allen ripped their hearts out with an off-balance three-pointer. But even with five rings the Spurs are the most under-the-radar juggernaut in sports today — and in NBA history.

The Spurs have made it to the playoffs for 19 straight seasons. The next longest active streak in the NBA? Eight straight seasons by the Atlanta Hawks (really!). The only two other teams since the 1960s who danced in the postseason for 19 years or more were the Utah Jazz (1984-2003) and Portland Trailblazers (1983-2003), both of whom never won it all. Nor could either come close to matching San Antonio's record of 12 seasons with a winning percentage of over .700 during their playoff streaks (combined, the Jazz and Blazers hit .700 only seven times).

Think about what an era encompassing 19 seasons is. The beginning of the Magic/Bird era of the 1980s, through the 1990s running of the Bulls, to the Shaq and Kobe Lakers' early 2000s three-peat. That's 19 seasons. It's also three distinctly different eras of the game.

Since the late '90s, the Spurs have always been there, poised to quietly and methodically win with as little drama, fanfare, and glamour as possible. During that time they won at least one playoff series in all but four seasons. Contrast that with the New York Knicks (perennially Forbes' "most valuable franchise"), who since losing to the Spurs in the 1999 NBA Finals have won exactly one playoff series in only five postseason appearances.

One possible reason the Spurs have never captured the public's imagination is that despite their relentless greatness, they've never won consecutive championships, which even teams like the Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets, and Miami Heat have accomplished in the past few decades. There's something about the repeats and three-peats that make for heroes and villains even casual fans can understand.

In 2014, Jason Concepcion wrote in Grantland that the Spurs' public invisibility is largely due to their style of success:

But it's not just constant winning that hurts the Spurs' Q rating. Tim Duncan, arguably the greatest power forward of all-time, is always so pathologically even-tempered that articles featuring his non-plussed face and jibing his "decades of pent-up emotion" are regular features in The Onion.

On the management side, the Spurs' pockmarked head coach, Gregg Popovich, is known for being so unforthcoming and downright rude that New England Patriots uber-villain Bill Belichick seems positively gregarious by comparison. But unlike Darth Belichick, Popovich's aloofness fails to get a rise out of the public, when it's even noted at all.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Spurs' run is that when it began, the team was defined by the "Twin Towers" of Duncan and Hall of Fame center David Robinson, only to evolve into the behemoth of the "Big 3" comprised of Duncan plus star guards Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, and finally, the current incarnation featuring the aging Big 3 being superseded by All-Star LaMarcus Aldridge and ascendant superstar Kawhi Leonard.

This just isn't supposed to happen. Teams have their moment, peak, then fall apart because of bad contracts, injury, or internal discord. Not the Spurs. They find new stars to rotate into Pop's system before the old ones have even retired.

So while the Warriors make history and seemingly rewrite the rules of what's possible in today's NBA, remember that the Spurs have been doing just that for two decades. And while 67 wins (which in any other year would be a sure bet for best record in the league) might not be the record smasher that Golden State's 73 is, it's awfully good. Especially when you look at it in the context of the last two decades.