I went to bed last night thinking about coach Pop. I woke up this morning thinking about coach Pop. All day, as I’ve run errands and ate lunch, I’ve done nothing but think about Coach Pop. What could he be doing? Could he actually be attempting to deceive the rest of the league? Is he so confident we can pull it together that he has no concern about our present lack of cohesion? Has he simply gone mad? I’ve sloshed these questions around in my brain all day and I have a hypothesis I’d like to present.

Earlier this season, we looked great. Our shots were falling. Our defense had solidified. We toppled the Lakers in a game the memory of which I will always cherish. We defeated the defending champs on their home floor. Tony Parker entered the ranks of the game’s elite. George Hill looked like Bowen reborn. Intermittently, Bowen himself gave us some classic defensive performances. After the roughest beginning we’ve had in years, the team turned into a contender and shot back to the top of the Western Conference standings.

All this time, Pop kept repeating the same fact: We are not better than the Lakers. Even after we beat the Lakers, Pop reminded everyone that we would probably lose a 7 game series against LA. Yesterday, when asked what it would take to beat the Cavs in Cleveland, he responded, “be as good as the Lakers, which we aren’t.”

I had never heard Pop talk like this. In every previous season, I felt Popovich’s attitude was, “if we play our best, we can beat anyone.” We may not have always been playing our best, but if we played to our potential, we were a championship caliber team. This season, that has not been Pop’s attitude. All year long, he has talked about this team as if it’s ceiling is the Western Conference Finals.

If that is truly his attitude, it may explain his recent rotational experimentation, including its more unsavory aspects. Whether Popovich believes we are a contender or not, a title still remains the goal. That is the expectation this team has created for itself. And if Pop believed we were playing at the level of a contender, he would have left things as they were.

But we weren’t a contender. We were only referred to as one out of habit.

So Pop decided to take a few chances. Some of them have worked (Although not a paragon of consistency, Udoka’s has been very productive since Pop increased his minutes). Some have been complete failures (Vaughn brings nothing to the court; Finley is completely unprepared to guard elite wings). Some have been a wash (Starting Ginobili has been neither here nor there in my book).

This all says one thing to me very clearly: If we aren’t going to win a title this season, Pop isn’t horribly concerned which round of the playoffs we lose in. But, just in case a title is still a possibility, he is stretching the limits of our rotation to see exactly what each man is capable of. In some ways, I appreciate the dogged manner in which he has sifted through this roster’s potential. But in some ways, it leaves me feeling very frustrated.

I’m frustrated because I don’t need the Spurs to win a title to be proud of them. I was proud of the way we played last year. In the first round, numerous analysts picked us to lose to the Suns. In the second round, many people thought we would finally be forced into irrelevance at the hands of a mercurial Hornets squad. After we were picked apart by the Lakers, many people thought the Spurs would fall to the back of the playoff pack by the end of this season. Proving those doubters wrong time and time again has given me plenty of reasons to hold my head high.

What frustrates me about our recent struggles is how unnecessary I believe they are. I agree with Pop that, if we remained on our previous course, we were destined for a 5 or 6 game exit against the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. But I would have been content with that. We would have played our brand of basketball and played it well. As a fan, that’s what I want to see: our boys playing our game. If that brings us another title, that’s amazing. If it doesn’t, that’s alright. At least I could look back and say we played to our full potential. But the spiritless, unfocused play that has been the by-product of Pop’s recent coaching decisions. That’s what I cannot stand.