Spurs fail to gain ground in West with brutal loss to Clippers

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We shouldn’t take anything away from the Los Angeles Clippers when we talk about how the Spurs didn’t show up to Saturday night’s embarrassing loss. They’re a really good team. They’re easy to make fun of because they do dumb things like lose to New Orleans without Anthony Davis and have a very thin bench, but when their offense is clicking they’re as tough as any team in the league. The problem Saturday night is the San Antonio Spurs made it incredibly easy for Clippers to look elite, getting hammered 105-85.

The Clippers are middle of the road in both opponents turnovers and forcing steals. The Spurs made them look like the best in the league last night with sloppy, uninspired play. Things started poorly with a 9-2 run and didn’t really get any better. It didn’t help that DeAndre Jordan had one of those games where he was everywhere on defense (19 rebounds, 4 blocks), but often times those turnovers or long misses would lead a Blake Griffin coast-to-coast dunk or some other score with an NBA 2K rookie level ease of scoring. If you watched the ESPN broadcast, you heard coach Gregg Popovich say a couple of different times his team looked like the team playing their fourth game in five nights while the Clippers looked liked they’d only played three games all week. This loss was all about effort and the Clippers ability to continuously slam the door on any short attempts the Spurs made to get back into the game.

It’d be really easy to look at this game and the Chicago annihilation from a week and a half ago and go to DEFCON 2, but we’re just simply not there yet. The Clippers, for all the internet’s jokes, have won eight of ten and have the NBA’s third best point differential on the season. They’ve also crept up to third in the Western Conference, so again, it’s not like this Mortal Kombat fatality of a loss came at the hands of the Sacramento Kings or some other lottery bound team. The Spurs had some nice wins in January including Washington to start the month without Tony Parker or Kawhi Leonard and a beatdown of Portland that reminded everyone of the Spurs from last year’s title run. That team’s still in there and we’re approaching the time where we usually start to see that consistency and all-around offensive execution we’ve grow accustomed to in the last couple of years. Bright note: Kawhi Leonard’s offensive game continues to catch up with the defensive side of things. He also is aware enough to take advantage when lesser wings (in this case Matt Barnes) are guarding him.

Next up is another long break before they host Orlando on Wednesday (figure a hard practice or two will be mixed in there) and then they host Miami on Friday night before the east coast swing of the Rodeo Road Trip begins in Toronto next Sunday.

Also, has anyone checked on whether Boris Diaw still lives?

  • fkj74

    We had a chance to gain some ground and blew it. Hope we shake off the mental cobwebs soon. Go Spurs.

  • hoopsaf

    Tony Parker’s presence hurts everyone in the starting lineup. Considering that Spurs use a lot of analytics internally (e.g. they use SportVU to find the tiniest tendencies/strengths/weaknesses of players), I’m sure Pop and the staff know how bad Tony Parker has been. He’s bad to the point that every advanced metric (WinsProduced, WinShare, RPM, WAR — each one comes from a different premise and is computed differently) tells Parker is the worst player in the team.

    His offense is barely average nowadays and he’s been atrociously bad on defense and rebounding. The starting unit’s defensive ratings plummeted and Parker is a huge reason for this. He’s trying to stay in front of the opposing player, but other than that, his help defense is close to non-existent, he can’t rotate fast enough, he can’t rebound misses and he very rarely can go and get a loose ball unless it falls right to him.

    The two Frenches in the team have been absolute disasters this season (and unfortunately, these two are two of the highest paid). Boris became the big fat Charlotte Boris after the big fat contract. He seems to have no motivation and his ability to make 3 point shots just disappeared entirely.

  • Ed Yates

    Looks pretty bad. No effort and none of them seemed concerned they were getting embarrassed. This is a 1st round exit team right now. If they don’t wake up on the Rodeo trip then they can make May vacation plans.

  • spurs10

    Well I feel we got beat up in this game. Tony was literally hit in the face on two different drives to the basket and the refs were letting it happen. They were giving out hard fouls for free and it completely disrupted our offense. The board differential says it all. Pop made some noise , but I felt like nobody was standing up to their physical play.

  • brunostrange

    Tony is playing some of the most timid ball of his career these days. Unless he finds that extra gear (which may not happen, unfortunately it seems as though this is the year Father Time catches up to him), he’ll continue to get beat up by opposing defenses.

  • firedoug

    I was so frustrated that Pop didn’t pull Tony. For all intents and purposes Pop pulled him against the Bucks and the Spurs turned it around. The Spurs were not out of it until late so I didn’t understand the decision making. Atleast give Cory or Patty a shot. Tony is a disaster right now. He takes the bulk of the shots, turns the ball over, and plays bad defense. What a trifecta. When he struggles like this he pushes even harder. That leads to consecutive 2-10 first half shooting outputs.