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 [...]

The weeks immediately following the trade deadline are usually kind to San Antonio. It’s typical for veteran buyouts to angle for a spot on San Antonio’s roster, hoping to hitch a ride to a championship.  But the times have changed.

Via TrueHoop:
The Spurs were hoping to tempt Miami into absorbing Mason’s $3.8 million expiring contract into a $4.3 million trade exception that would have enabled the teams to complete a deal without San Antonio needing to take back another player. A future second-round pick from the Heat would have completed the transaction.
But the Heat, dealing [...]

Breaking news can now be done in less than 140 characters.
Adrain Wojnarowski tweets that the Spurs will seek to accommodate a Roger Mason Jr. trade request.
Mason wants more minutes.

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.

Last week we ran a series of features exploring three options for the Spurs: Make no move; make a minor roster move; and make a major roster move. There was supposed to be one more- a post arguing that we should make moves focused on future seasons- that for various reasons was never published. After [...]

Yesterday I ran a piece that attempted to point out an obvious development that some have missed: Tim Duncan is playing very well this season. Some want to qualify this by saying Duncan is receiving less double-teams, to which my response is “so what?” and “is he really?” Honestly, I’m not sure that assertion is [...]

The storylines that defined tonight’s victory over the Timberwolves are self-evident. Manu Ginobili’s craftiness and intensity poured forth in torrential proportions. Richard Jefferson played with a swagger and physicality which, were this not the present, would appear anachronistic to the Duncan era. And, if Roger Mason had not already driven the final nail into the [...]

There are lots of positives to take away from tonight’s victory over the Los Angeles Clippers: the continued excellency of Tim Duncan; Tony Parker’s reignited aggressiveness; and what you might generally refer to as 48 minutes of sustained focus on both ends of the floor. But for me the story of the game is the [...]

Above is the play-by-play for the final ten seconds of last night’s game against the Indiana Pacers. Hidden inside this very standard and typically unhelpful form of score-keeping is a wealth of information about what has been going right and wrong for the Spurs this season.

You know what they say about a team’s final five being more important than its starting five. Well, that’s all true. In a perfect world, one free of foul trouble and injury concerns, a coach finishes the game with his best five players on the floor.
Through 8 games, George Hill is unquestionably the Spurs’ 5th [...]