For those of you who missed it, here’s the set up.
The Spurs are down 3 with 9 seconds remaining. Popovich has the clipboard, which usually means a clean look out of the timeout. At this point in the game, Roger Mason Jr. was 0-7 from distance. Manu Ginobili was 6-10, but he had also scored [...]

The unstated position of my Dime piece is straightforward: the Spurs’ defense is failing.
“Defensive transition was really poor in the first half. I thought we did a horrible job with that and we gave away 8, 10, 12 points just because they ran it right down our throat and our transition was God-awful. That was [...]

Wayne Winston, who achieved celebrity status at Dorkapalooza 2010, emailed this morning to say the Spurs should be fine without Parker, at least over the balance of the season. Obviously, they’ll need Parker in order to compete in postseason play.
The APM answer to Tony Parker’s injury, at least in the short term, is to mitigate [...]

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wayne Winston’s work is the ability of adjusted plus/minus to, in the words of Gregg Popovich, “indicate trends.” My conversations with Wayne Winston have mostly operated at the level of 5-man units. But last night he sent me an email that’s worth posting because of its focus on [...]

It’s tough to hate Durant. Aside from having one of the smoothest games in the Association, he’s also got to be one of the humblest athletes around. How many players would have responded to a block like that by saying “great play”?
(h/t Project Spurs)

San Antonio began the fourth quarter of this afternoon’s game against Phoenix with a three point lead. Over the next 12 minutes, the Spurs did not make too many defensive stops; Amare Stoudemire, Steve Nash, and Jason Richardson all scored with ease. Luckily the Suns aren’t exactly known for their lockdown defense either, and the [...]

For a season that started with such promise, Spurs fans sure have been left clamoring for some positive news following some of the unfortunate, potentially disheartening and even depressing stories that have been written this season. Even the Rodeo Road Trip, the mythical cure for all that ails the Spurs, ended with disappointing losses at Philadelphia [...]

Recently, 48MoH has discussed the struggles of San Antonio’s interior defense.  Please see The Roots of Defensive Decline and The Root of All Defensive Evil for discussion of these points.  But a struggling interior defense is often an indication of a prior breakdown on the perimeter, which seems to be the case with San Antonio this season, Manu Ginobili’s [...]

Although this play will define Ginobili’s night in the minds of most, it’s worth mentioning that it was only one instance from a prolonged period during which Manu absolutely owned the court.

The Spurs and Pistons were tied at the half.
Detroit controlled the game for most of the second half, commanding an 11 point lead at the 4:54 mark, before the game took an entertaining turn. Gregg Popovich decided to intentionally foul Ben Wallace, who has a .438 FT%. 
The coaching maneuver worked, and the crowd at the Palace wanted [...]

When a team is playing well, it typically moves from lesser to greater certainty as the season progresses. All the big questions that lead the season find a satisfactory resolution in a sharp player rotation, efficient scoring, and a defense that can, at least, get the necessary stops that winning requires. Those things come together, [...]

Throughout the Tim Duncan era the Spurs have operated on a certain stonecutters credo. Ironically, they now operate between a rock and a hard place. With a broken chisel.
The rock? Richard Jefferson’s burdensome contract. The hard place? The NBA Salary Cap. In the short term, there will be those who are disappointed that the Spurs [...]

Wayne Winston, who served as a statistical consultant to the Dallas Mavericks for the last nine years, and is the author of Mathletics, was kind enough to explore a handful of Spurs-related questions with me. Over the next few days I’ll put up a series of short posts detailing the more salient moments of our [...]

Leaving the All-Star weekend, perhaps no theme encapsulated the Spurs more perfectly nor enemy loomed so big–well, maybe the Laker’s frontline–as time.
And not just time, as in the amount of time left in their stars’ careers, but timing. Timing is everything.

If you wrote a book about this season, which story lines would play most prominently in your retelling of the story. The decline of Spurs’ defense? The slight but unmistakable devolution of Manu Ginobili’s game? Tony Parker’s game-weary legs? The promise of DeJuan Blair and George Hill? Tim Duncan’s squandered brilliance? The emergence of small-ball [...]