San Antonio Spurs 105, Los Angeles Clippers 88: Different plot, same ending
AT&T CENTER — It was just a number written on a dry erase board. Just two simple motions with a marker all alone in the top right corner. Somehow, though, it was huge. The number 10 sat there, waiting to be erased and replaced with a 9. Then an 8. And so on and so forth until it is erased completely and champagne soaks the carpet of the Spurs locker room.
I’m sure it was at 11 earlier Thursday evening, before the Spurs went out and put a 105-88 hurting on the Los Angeles Clippers and took a 2-0 lead in the second round series. Heading now to a Saturday and Sunday back-to-back that, for once, may be more of a concern for the younger team being shown the ropes in this series than it is for this Spurs team finally boasting three stars on the wrong side of 30.
San Antonio picked up where they left off in Game 1, harassing Clippers point guard Chris Paul with a variety of looks, helps and switches on defense. So disruptive was the Spurs D that Paul finished with likely his worst career playoff game (10 points, 4-9 shooting, five assists, eight turnovers). And while the Clippers shot a better percentage (49%) than in Game 1, they only once scored more than 21 points in a quarter on Thursday night.
“Tony did the lion’s share of work tonight on Chris,” Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich said after the game. “He really set a tone defensively for us. He was just driven and did one hell of a job.”
The Spurs started off well offensively, getting 10 points each from Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, but San Antonio wasn’t getting the same contributions from its role players that it got in Game 1. Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard, who combined for 31 points on 11-19 shooting in the opening game of the series contributed a total of just four shots in the first half of Game 2, converting one.
In the second half, a Leonard runner followed three possessions later by back-to-back Danny Green 3-pointers helped turn a four point halftime advantage into a 11 point Spurs lead. Green went on to finish with 13 points in the game.
The Spurs bench encountered its first struggles in some time on Thursday night. Typically a major strength for San Antonio, they struggled to defend the Clippers late in the first quarter and in the second. Los Angeles scored nine points in the last 1:53 of the opening quarter after Eric Bledsoe subbed in for Paul and what was an early 15 point lead settled at eight after 1.
“When the second unit of the Clippers came, they played a lot harder and a lot more physical than us,” Tony Parker said post game. “I thought the second half we did a better job to match the energy and match the intensity.”
Coach Pop stuck with his starters longer in the third quarter, not making his initial substitution of the second half until the five minute mark of the third. Tiago Splitter started the third quarter in place of Boris Diaw because, as Coach Pop put it, “Boris had three fouls.” Although, as Matthew Tynan of Pounding the Rock pointed out during the game, it would make sense to play Splitter alongside Tim Duncan against the Clippers’ bigger front court of DeAndre Jordan and Blake Griffin. Popovich can get away with playing Diaw and Matt Bonner against the smaller big man tandem of Kenyon Martin and Reggie Evans.
Despite being the third leading scorer, man of the match was probably Diaw. The extricated former Charlotte Bobcat scored 16 points and hit all seven of his field goal attempts, including two 3-pointers, while contributing the passing chops that make him a great secondary playmaking option when defenses attack Tony Parker hard on pick-and-rolls.
“He can pass the ball better than many of the big men I have every played with,” Duncan said. “He is starting to shoot the ball and get his confidence in that respect.”
Throw in solid defense on Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan and his willingness to battle on the boards and the Spurs are sleeping comfortably with Diaw in the starting lineup.
And now the Spurs head to Los Angeles with the number 10 on their minds. 10 wins to an improbable finish. The team that has won 43 of its last 50 games must win 10 of a possible 19 games to add a fifth Larry O’Brien trophy to its collection. For now, the Spurs will focus on the next two, hoping to come back on Monday morning and mark down an 8.
a WTF performance from Boris!
Great win. It is tough when the Clippers bench comes in. They have no real system. They play loose and confident, no ball movement or anything like that. They pretty much just try and shoot threes. It must be frustrating for the Spurs. They play good D and then Foye or young hit a crazy three.
I was kind of worried about the back-to-back games but they’ve actually done good on back-to-backs this year. And they won both their back-to-back-to-backs. I think Clips are going to shoot even better at home, but I don’t think they can improve much defensively. Sore are playi g so good that the only thing that I see that can hurt them is a major scoring drought. A drought like the one in Utah in game 4. Having said that, The Spurs are just on a mission, man.
Does anyone have access to the content written by John Hollinger on ESPN “Insider” on Spurs success, yesterday?
I would be very interested in seeing what he has written….
Thanks!
RAVI - JH’s take
We’re basically watching two versions of the playoffs right now.
In one version, a team has some players on the court who can score and others who pretty much can’t, and the objective of the opposing defense is to send extra defenders at the former and give shots to the latter. We saw a great example of that Wednesday night, when both the Lakers and Thunder ignored two of the five opponents on the court to focus their efforts on the other three and, as a result, suffocated two teams that are normally quite good offensively.
Then there’s the other version, being played by the Spurs, in which everybody can score, at all times, and the defense is left with no clue what to do about it. It’s a masterful piece of team-building that, amazingly, was all but ignored in the Executive of the Year voting announced Wednesday. But more on that in a minute.
As for this offensive juggernaut: No Spur averaged 20 points a game this season and only three regulars averaged double figures, but the sum of all their secondary contributors is enormous. Twelve Spurs have scored at least 20 points in a game this season, and thanks to that broad-based attack, they led the league in offensive efficiency in the regular season and are doing it again the playoffs.
It’s obvious why when you watch them. Whom do you leave open? Teams want to commit extra defenders to stopping pick-and-rolls by Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and post-ups by Tim Duncan, but how? Five Spurs shot better than 40 percent on 3s, and Kawhi Leonard made 37.6 percent.
Maybe commit a big man and rely on the Spurs to miss near the rim? Not so fast — Tiago Splitter shot 61.6 percent, DeJuan Blair 53.4 percent and Boris Diaw 58.8 percent as a Spur.
Here’s what you do: Pray they miss. Those boring, defense-first Spurs have changed their stripes into a floor-spacing, drive-and-kick, Euroball offense, and the results have been devastating. The only thing boring about them now is that they win every game. If you haven’t heard the numbers already, digest these: San Antonio has won 29 of its past 32 games and 22 of 25 on the road (with two of the three defeats coming when the Spurs rested their starters).
They’re only gaining steam. In the past 13 games they played their starters, they won 12 by double figures, and with their superior depth, they’ve been able to keep everybody remarkably fresh. As they keep rolling up playoff wins, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the inevitability of a fifth boat parade on the Riverwalk.
San Antonio has done this, I’ll remind you again, without a single top-20 draft pick this decade … a decade in which the Spurs have won 50 or more games every season, even this lockout-truncated one. The last time they had a high pick, they had the good fortune to win the Duncan lottery, and some people still feel like that discounts everything their front office has accomplished since.
Here’s a news flash: The Spurs outscored opponents by 8.19 points per 100 possessions without Duncan on the floor this season, even though those numbers are skewed by a couple of games that coach Gregg Popovich blatantly tanked in order to keep his players fresh.
And 8.19 points per 100 possessions was better than every other team in the league except Chicago. So yes, take away Duncan and the Spurs are still a dominant team. Moreover, they’ve built it with a superior plan — one undertaken with the understanding of how important the lockout would make depth and rest.
Which takes us to the curious case of the league’s Executive of the Year voting, won by the Pacers’ Larry Bird. No disrespect to Larry Legend, who certainly has overseen a masterful rebuilding work by the Pacers, but the fact that San Antonio’s R.C. Buford didn’t win is a joke. One wonders what league the NBA’s general managers have been watching for the past decade, one in which Buford has yet to win the award.
Buford came in second this time, with 14 of the league’s 30 GMs leaving him off their ballots entirely. Which means 14 of the league’s 30 GMs are either jealous, morons or both. You look at the ballots and wonder whether these guys are following their own league.
(Among those receiving votes: David Kahn, who used consecutive top-six picks on Jonny Flynn and Wes Johnson and dropped $20 million on Darko Milicic; Otis Smith, who fruitlessly shot money out a firehose in Orlando and seems likely to be relieved of his duties; Pat Riley, whose investments in Mike Miller, Udonis Haslem and Joel Anthony have failed so badly that it might prevent LeBron James from winning him a championship; Rod Thorn, who didn’t acquire any of his team’s top eight players or its coach and tried to trade Andre Iguodala for Monta Ellis; and Chris Wallace, who has done some genuinely good work except for the part about trading Kevin Love for O.J. Mayo and drafting Hasheem Thabeet.)
The problem here is the old checkers versus chess analogy. The fact that Bird won over Buford speaks to how many moves the Spurs are ahead of much of the rest of the league on the chessboard.
Take the two trades San Antonio made in the past year. The first was between Buford and Bird, the swap of George Hill for Leonard. It wasn’t a bad trade for Indiana; the Pacers exchanged a first-rounder for a point guard, and they banked on Hill’s Indiana roots as a factor in being able to keep him in free agency after this season.
That’s a solid move for Indy, and for the chunk of the league’s GMs who just throw stuff at the wall and hope something sticks, that’s about as deeply as they saw it.
But for San Antonio, I don’t think people realize what a spectacularly good trade this was. Not just because it gave the Spurs a defender at the 3 who proved better than people expected, but because of the cap ramifications.
Leonard is on a rookie contract, and will make $1.8 million, $1.9 million and $2.9 million in the coming three seasons; Hill, meanwhile, will re-sign for somewhere between $5 million and $7 million a pop as a restricted free agent. Over the next three seasons, the Spurs will save about $12 million as a result of making this trade, without losing anything on the court.
If this was baseball and it was just money, no biggie. But this is a salary-cap league with a punitive luxury tax, so considerations such as the one above matter hugely; you simply can’t build a consistent contender if you’re not planning ahead on these matters. The extra $4 million annual reduction in the Spurs’ cap number is potentially huge.
This pattern repeats itself up and down the San Antonio roster. Take a look at the contracts and prepare to drop your jaw: Blair, Diaw, Danny Green and Gary Neal all make less than $1 million; Leonard and James Anderson make less than $2 million, and the more handsomely compensated Splitter and Matt Bonner still add up to barely more than the midlevel exception.
Which takes us to San Antonio’s other deal, made with Golden State at the trade deadline, in which the Spurs dealt one of the rare mistakes of the Buford era, Richard Jefferson, and a 2012 first-round pick for Stephen Jackson. San Antonio was so many moves ahead on the chessboard on this one that I’m not sure anyone in Golden State has yet realized how badly the Warriors were fleeced.
Jefferson and Jackson are roughly equivalent players who are both coming to the end of the line, except that Jefferson makes $11 million in 2013-14 and Jackson isn’t owed anything. In recent draft history, late first-round and early second-round picks have sold for about $3 million in cash; the price has probably moved above $3 million for the first round but not appreciably so, based on the cash exchanged for early-seconds.
The Spurs, somehow, effectively fetched $11 million for the No. 29 pick in this year’s draft, or nearly quadruple the going rate.
If it were just $11 million in cash, we might shrug our shoulders — it’s only the owners’ money after all. But this is $11 million in the far more valuable commodity of cap number.
Lowering the cap number, I’ll remind you, isn’t just about signing big free agents — an area the Spurs have basically ignored since Jason Kidd spurned them in 2002. It gives wiggle room under the tax, opens options for trades, allows use of the full midlevel exception and opens innumerable other closed doors. Anytime you can create it at a 70 percent discount — which San Antonio effectively did — it’s laugh-to-the-bank stuff.
It’s because of moves like this that the long-rumored “closing window” in San Antonio never actually closes. The Spurs’ ability to manage their cap, and find and retain low-cost players is the unwritten success story of this past decade — look at this season, for example, and you’ll see two starters and a key reserve (Diaw, Green and Neal) who were scrap-heap pickups on minimum deals.
As a result, the Spurs are kicking everybody’s butt, just like they’ve done every season this decade, while everyone waits patiently for an impending decline that never happens. One wonders when their peers might grant some acknowledgment for this. On the other hand, maybe that helps explain why they’ve been so successful.
Ravi,
The Hollinger article was one of his better ones I’ve read in a while. It basically outlines how the Spurs front office are men among boys when it comes to building an organization. It then details all the savvy acquisitions of the past few years (especially this season) that have allowed such incredible success.
The best line of the article, referring to Buford’s 2nd place finish in the GM of the year award:
“Buford came in second this time, with 14 of the league’s 30 GMs leaving him off their ballots entirely. Which means 14 of the league’s 30 GMs are either jealous, morons or both. You look at the ballots and wonder whether these guys are following their own league.”
LOL.
If you’re interested in reading the entire article, message me and I’ll help you out.
@ Andrew McNeil
Any word on Chris Paul’s health? He definitely hasn’t shown his normal explosiveness.
As for Diaw, I’m pretty surprised not with his offensive ability (he did come into the league as a 2/3), but with his commitment to defense. He’s been great on Griffin. I initially though he might struggle with Blake’s athleticism, but he’s been able to be much more physical than I anticipated.
Also, imagine an in-shape, trimmed Boris Diaw after a summer with Tim Duncan????
Every time I see Bonner and Splitter on the court together I am in fear that the opposing coach will figure out how to go on a 15-0 run with them on the court. Glad Splitter has been getting minutes as he works his way into figuring out the NBA and the Spurs system.
Some article I read this morning hinted at talks that Duncan would sign a new contract for years (I thought 3 being the most). With this team, this deep, and if we get everyone to come back cheap, I am really amazed at the way this group looks.
When was the last time a team went 9-13 from the 3 point line and 49% from 2 point and lost the game by double digits? The Clippers bench was throwing up long bomb prayers and knocking down every one. They have got to be discouraged.
AD,
Great write-up. It was indeed a traveshamockery that Buford didn’t win Exec of the Year. I think Buford gets punished for consistent excellence among his players, his coach, and himself that leads others to discount his achievements. Bird certainly has done a good job resurrecting a faltering Pacers franchise, but Buford has turned what, at the end of last season’s playoffs, was a team on obvious decline that even Tony Parker believed would never compete for a championship again, and turned them into a juggernaut and arguably the best Spurs team since Duncan’s 15-year reign of terror began.
I, and hopefully Buford as well, will be sufficiently consoled if the Spurs win another championship though.
The Spurs (Manu) jacked too many threes, couldn’t hit free throws (Splitter), allowed the Clips to shoot open threes, and yet still won by 17. The Spurs have won by 16 and 17 points, but it really doesn’t seem like they’ve played all that well in this series so far.
Game 3 will dictate how long this series goes. If Spurs pull out game 3 then the series is over in a MAXIMUM of 5 games. If the Clippers win game 3 then Spurs could be in for a longer series. From what I’ve seen so far, LA has some series health issues they are trying to hide. Although Griffin looks like he might be relatively healthy, Paul looks like he’s playing at 70%. If that continues to be the case (and I don’t see how it changes in just 2 short days) then this series will be real quick.
Great John Hollinger article. One thing he failed to mention is the huge addition by subtraction of RJ. OPening up floor time for Leonard and Jackson at the 3 has been huge for this team. Leonard is already giving us more than Jefferson ever has, and Jackson, even though I’m a little disappointed in his offensive contributions, he finds ways to contribute, and is capable of taking shots when the team needs him to.
@JustinFL
I think it was more opening up time for Green and Leonard. SJax has been great in a limited role.
@JustinFL
Great analogy in the addition by subtraction of RJ.
As far as the Clips…I wouldn’t want to give them any pointers …so I won’t suggest what I think would help them the most regarding Paul.
@AD
Thanks for the Hollinger reference. Great read. Spot on.
@Stijl
Paul can stop trying that pick and roll and start shooting 3′s or from the perimeter but then that will only turn itnot a street ball game for the Clips. Everyone for his own!
@Hobson13
Unfortunately our 2nd unit has played like crap in this series and our first unit for the first time in a very long time carried the rest of the team as it should. But you have to remember some of these 2nd unit guys aren’t getting sooner into the game and playing as many minutes like they did in the regular season when we looked like we had to 1st unit teams. I don’t understand why that changed because we played the same teams during the regular season and spanked them anyway. We’ll see if that improves.
I like the lineup with Tiago and Timmy on the floor defensively and if those two can read each other better and get in their places to accommodate each other quickly we’ll see better fluidity. I know Tiago was in there with Timmy because Diaw was in foul trouble but they might want to revisit that in the near future when they play the other big front courts in the playoffs. They will need it. Boris Diaw is Blair with a perimeter shot. Which makes me wonder what happens next season if Diaw is asked to come back? Do we keep both Bonner and Blair or move one of them? Or do we keep them both and don’t go after any more bigs? I’d rather keep Diaw and go after a good giant big. That leaves either Bonner or Blair the odd man out. Or heck they might even move Splitter because of his health issues but that’s a little more far fetched, but any thing is possible with the coach of the year and the Executive (2nd place) of the year.
@Idahospur:
The Spurs have outscored their opponents by 215 in the 703 minutes that Tiago and Bonner have been on the court together. Don’t worry, be happy!
AD,
Thanks a lot for sharing the article! It was an awesome read and I really appreciate your help.
Jake - thanks for the synopsis…
This is the best blog on the TH network and dedicated Spurs fans (like all of us) only make this site even better!!!
Hope we can all, together, celebrate the continued success of the Spurs for years to come!!