Despite Win Against Magic, Spurs Failing to Convince
By all accounts, the Spurs seemed in good spirits after Wednesday night’s win. The team is finally on the cusp of fielding a full roster, some fifty games or so into the season, and they’re within shouting distance of home court in at least one playoff round.
But for the relief Wednesday seemed to bring, in a game where the bench unit looked like itself again as Marco Belinelli (11 points, 3/4 from three) caught fire in his return, there was no shadow big enough to hide the elephant in the room.
The Spurs aren’t very good right now.
There’s a massive qualifier in that statement, and there’s nothing particularly flammable about that take when you acknowledge both the immediacy and the fleeting reality of “right now.” More than any other team in the Western Conference, the Spurs have been slowed by the specter of injury, an ominous cloud that has hung over the first half of this season, culminating in the horror show of an ugly December. Key players have missed massive chunks of time, forcing the team to utilize odd lineup changes for big stretches of the season. So the smiles and the buoyancy in the locker room after another win was understandable. Despite a late “healthy scratch” of Tiago Splitter, the Spurs are close to looking like themselves again, and they pulled out a convincing win. Why hang your head?
The only issue one could raise after the win is important, though: the Spurs beat the Orlando Magic. To clarify, save for a late run, they barely beat the Orlando Magic.
Anybody who watches the NBA will tell you that in a long season, any outcome is possible, so on the face of it, there wasn’t anything too shocking about seeing a Magic team – even one ranked 25th in Offensive and Defensive Efficiency – show up to compete. While their roster is a bit of a mess, there are enough quality pieces to field something competitive, and the Spurs had their hands full with Nikola Vucevic (25 points, 13 rebounds) and Tobias Harris (23 points, 10 rebounds, 6 assists). Vucevic and Harris have given a lot of teams trouble this season, so that wasn’t particularly revelatory.
What is less understandable, though, is that the Spurs would also have their hands full for short, but key, stretches dealing with guys like Elfrid Payton and Willie Green. The Magic are 24th in the NBA in points per game, a completely unsurprising statistic when you’ve watched Victor Oladipo miss 16 of his 21 attempts, but the Spurs allowed the team to shoot 50% from the floor and 47.6% from three to finish the game with 103 points. The Magic have only hit 100 points 15 times in the 51 games they’ve played that ended in regulation. They are a terrible offensive team, and for the opening quarter and, of course, the third quarter, the Spurs made you wonder if Magic head coach Jacque Vaughn, currently fighting to keep his job, was really just the victim of some kind of sinister conspiracy.
When the Spurs got blown out by Chicago a week or so ago, there were reasons to explain the loss away. It was the final game of a cross country road trip, and the Bulls were desperate for a win after dropping four in a row. When the Spurs got blown out by the Clippers on Saturday, there weren’t any easily reachable excuses. The Spurs had won three in a row and looked poised for a run. The Clippers had been rolling, save for a misstep against a Pelicans team missing Anthony Davis, but you got the feeling San Antonio was beginning to gel. So when the Spurs got embarrassed from end to end, it was somewhat surprising, but in a season this long, losses like that happen. You learn to take them as they come, as they can be a cruel necessity for a team that appears to be lacking motivation.
The problem is, those losses are only valuable if they provide avenues and inspiration for improvement. It’s difficult to look at Wednesday’s game and find evidence for this happening. The Spurs defense, the closest thing the team has had to a constant in a difficult season, let a bad offensive team have a great game. Splitter’s absence might have contributed, but it was also the Magic’s outside shooting that killed the Spurs for much of the night.
It’s tempting to say the Spurs played down to their competition. This might be the case, but when the team hasn’t shown it can play evenly against the good competition, you start to wonder if this is simply their reality. There were enough good performances in the game to quiet such doubts for the night. Tim Duncan looked very much like a deserving recipient of All-Star recognition (26 points, 10 rebounds), and Kawhi Leonard had a solid night alongside him (18 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists, 4 steals). Manu Ginobili had one of his best games this season (13 points, 10 assists, 6 rebounds), though he did miss both of his free throw attempts. The team did enough to earn the win, and now tied with the Dallas Mavericks for sixth in a crazy Western Conference, they’ll take what they can get.
But despite all the smiles after the game, there was no denying reality, and it was telling that Ginobili was the one to quietly acknowledge the elephant in the room. “We really have to improve,” he told reporters after the game. “If not, we’re just going to make it to the playoffs and lose.”
Last year, the Spurs shrugged off the silliness of the “signature win” conversation, holding to their repeated demolishing of bad teams as a sign they could compete with anybody. Their late season push provided enough big wins to cement their status as a legitimate title contender. This season, the Spurs already have some big wins spread throughout the season, but their inability to put away the bad teams like they did last year is making these signatures look like forgeries. Games like this one against Orlando certainly help their push to secure homecourt, but with each down-to-the-wire victory against a struggling opponent, the Spurs start to toss some doubts at their big wins. Were they simply aberrations? Is this really the best San Antonio can be?
The Spurs aren’t very good right now. There’s time to improve, and this might not be the case in April. But there’s no escaping that eventually, “right now” becomes the end of the season.
