Spurs Find Alternate Ending in Pop’s Continued Experiment
SAN ANTONIO — For the second time in four days, the Spurs scored 94 points against the Mavericks. Friday’s story had an alternate ending we didn’t see in San Antonio’s 101-94 loss in Dallas on Tuesday, but much of the plot remained the same. The twists were just a little different this time.
San Antonio’s 94-76 win at the AT&T Center kept with a common season-long theme: Even as the offense floats up and down, the defense has provided relief. The Spurs pushed the lead out to as many as 21 points in the second quarter, but a Mavericks bum-rush cut the lead to four points with 6:43 remaining in the third, and things felt all too familiar.
But what we watched in the first five or six minutes after the break seemed like a mirage. For much of the first half, San Antonio looked like the team that steamrolled Oklahoma City on Wednesday. The cutting, the passing, the shooting, the defense — it was all there against a team that tends to defend the Spurs extraordinarily well. Then the wheels fell off again.
Perhaps that’s too dramatic. But it’s like when you were a kid and you screwed up your bike trying to take a jump and you fixed it yourself but you’re a kid so you suck at fixing things and the wheel keeps coming loose but you just manage to keep it functioning decently well because A) it’s a badass bike and B) you’re just a kid so you can’t buy a new one yourself. It’s like that.
San Antonio went 6-of-23 from the floor in the third quarter after shooting 51.2 percent in the first half. At one point, Patty Mills missed the rim completely on two consecutive shots — a wide-open 3-pointer from the corner and an eight-foot floater — as if he was shooting a beach ball.
Everything just looked ugly. But to the Spurs’ credit, they kept punching back. To Gregg Popovich’s credit, he never let his team get comfortable. In these moments where his team — the bench in particular this year — struggles to rekindle the spark that thrust it through the postseason last year, Pop slings guys in and out like a blackjack dealer flipping cards.
In the third quarter alone, when the game had suddenly fallen into doubt, the Spurs’ coach made nine substitutions and used seven different five-man lineups, per NBA.com’s lineup data. And it’s easy to understand why, as San Antonio’s bench struggled again. Boris Diaw, who’s looking more and more like the Bobo of a year ago, dropped in 19 points for the second consecutive game and at least 17 for the fourth time in six games. The problem is, he outscored the rest of the bench combined.
The Foreign Legion — that Mills, Diaw, Manu Ginobili, Marco Belinelli lineup — played only three minutes together, logging less court time than the previous game for the third consecutive night. Whatever the problem may be, Pop isn’t standing idly by.
He’s mixing and matching, blending bench players with starters in a constant flow of substitutions and trying to find the right fit. Not a single lineup played more than the eight minutes the starters spent together. With the depth this team boasts, he has that luxury. But beyond that, he also has the luxury of a defense that’s playing its ass off.
The Spurs held the Mavs to just 37.8-percent shooting, including 4-of-18 from deep, and forced 18 turnovers, nine of which were steals.
“I thought everybody was more scrappy than I’ve seen them. We need to do that with 50-50 balls, loose balls under the bucket, not letting guys get easy layups and going for the ball,” Popovich said. “If they go to the line then they go to the line, but not just giving up that easily.
“I thought their activity down there in the trenches was pretty good compared to last game.”
It hasn’t always been pretty, as the Beautiful Game from last May and June hasn’t returned on a consistent basis. And it may never reach that point again. The more exposure this team gets, the more attention it receives, and the more time passes, defenses will wise up. The flow of a year ago is being blocked more often than the team is accustomed.
But when the offense is inconsistent, the defense doesn’t have to be. San Antonio didn’t make the leap back toward title contention until its defense caught up to its pace-and-space scoring onslaughts; it is THE difference between this iteration and those of the late-2000s.
Still, the Spurs are not lacking in that search for rhythm. As the playoffs wind closer and closer, Pop is showing a willingness to continue with the experiment.
The offense can be the variable, so long as the defense is the constant.
