Are the Spurs in the midst of a championship hangover?
I don’t really want to go in depth about Friday’s Spurs-Lakers game. In fact, 48 Minutes of Hell’s Caleb Saenz described the game best via text message:
Last night’s 112-110 “what the hell just happened” loss was supposed to be a win. The Lakers are a bad, bad team, especially defensively. You would think that even short staffed (they were without Kawhi Leonard and of course Patty Mills), the Spurs offense would just zoom right past every missed or late LA defensive rotation. Instead, they had their third loss in 10 days against a team they clearly weren’t that interested in playing. That happens from time to time with good teams, but three of those games in less than two weeks is a little concerning. As Coach Gregg Popovich said last night in his, ahem, brisk post game news conference, these losses come down to effort.
“They definitely wanted the game more than us. It seemed to be more important to them than us. I thought our game was pitiful. We should be embarrassed with our effort.”
Post game, several other Spurs echoed Pop’s sentiments, at least as it relates to Friday’s game. This isn’t the first time Popovich has said something to this effect. Is it a championship hangover? Good teams don’t always take an 82 schedule serious, especially in December, but in a loaded West you need to pile up all the wins you can get. The good news is, the Spurs are playing well against good teams. In addition to the silly losses, they already have a stack of really good wins against the other elite of the league. This includes road wins against the Los Angeles Clippers, Golden State Warriors, Memphis Grizzlies and Cleveland Cavaliers and don’t forget the opening night victory against the Dallas Mavericks. Solid, solid wins and if you remember last season, some fans and media members had their concerns about this team specifically because they weren’t beating the other good teams in the league.
The problem is that if they don’t take all of these early season games serious they’re going to find themselves really pushing it to secure a top 4 seed in the Western Conference. Their schedule through the rest of the year doesn’t feature any of those “schedule wins” and has at least a couple “schedule losses.” Here’s how the rest of 2014 shakes out:
12/14: @Denver
12/15: @Portland
12/17: vs. Memphis
12/19: vs. Portland
12/20: @Dallas
12/22: vs. Clippers
12/25: vs. Oklahoma City
12/26: @New Orleans
12/28: vs. Houston
12/30: @Memphis
12/31: vs. New Orleans
I count four back-to-backs, at Portland, at Dallas, at New Orleans and vs. New Orleans, that the Spurs at the very least won’t be considered favorites and likely will sit some players for rest. They face two teams before the end of 2014 with losing records and that’s in 10-12 Denver, which isn’t exactly known for being a road team friendly place, and Christmas Day hosting Oklahoma City, which isn’t playing like a sub-.500 team with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook back. Besides that it’s all teams gunning for a playoff spot. If this is a championship hangover, hopefully Friday night’s pile of triceratops poop will prove to be a wake up call and I suspect that was part of Popovich’s motivation in his 40 second post game soliloquy.
One more thing:
-Shout out to ESPN’s Israel Guterrez for having the best getting “Pop’d” experience early in the season:
In fairness to Izzy, that’s about as thorough an answer Pop’s given during a mid-quarter interview maybe ever. Also, his second question wasn’t awful. But still, Israel Gutierrez, you’ve been Pop’d.
