Spurs v. Bucks: Kawhi Scare Puts Season into Perspective
“We will never play better than we did the last three games against Miami. Won’t happen.” When Gregg Popovich dropped this candid admission on a random night back in November, he wasn’t feigning humility. Nor was he simply downplaying expectations. For Popovich, a man whose demeanor has always reflected an unflinching realism, this was simply the truth. This was reality. The Spurs will never reach the same heights they did last June.
So this season has not been about reclaiming a former glory, talk of a repeat be damned. For the Spurs, it’s been a long, brutal struggle up a different mountain altogether. And just like every title has its own story, so does every season have its own potential.
We’re at the point now where the ghost of last year has been replaced by the cloud of an unknown future. Never mind last season. What is the Spurs’ ceiling this year? The roster may look the same, but the league has changed. A different context means different potential.
This isn’t a bad thing, nor is it particularly revelatory. If the Spurs want to win a sixth title, they were always going to have to do some burying. Last year’s run required getting past the lowest point in franchise history, no small feat. To reach this year’s potential the Spurs might have to do something harder in burying arguably the greatest height the team has ever reached.
In their quest to realize the potential of this season, there have been gobs of frustrating moments, from stretches where the roster was ravaged by injury to games where the team looked content to map out the floor before exploring the ceiling. In Thursday’s game against the Bulls, the Spurs team that took the court displayed an alarming lack of defensive focus, opening up lanes and capitulating to the energy of an amped opponent. After a defeat that Popovich called “humiliating” and “embarrassing,” you expected the team to respond aggressively, so Sunday night’s opening quarter against the Bucks was a stunner.
Milwaukee has one of the league’s best defenses, and its power was on display in the opening frame, as the Spurs committed several painful turnovers, clearly frustrated by the Bucks’ length and tenacity. The Spurs gave up a monster 20-2 run, and for a brief moment, it looked so much worse than potentially losing a single game. In the early moments of the first quarter, Kawhi Leonard calmly motioned to the bench requesting to leave, exiting the court with trainer Will Sevening, and the entire city held its collective breath.
For the Spurs, the only kind of potential they’re interested in this year revolves around the health of their reigning Finals MVP, the returning piece that has helped the Spurs right the ship, the Chicago game notwithstanding. Sometimes it really is that simple. The Spurs are a talented team, but potential is a fluid term. One player can mean the difference between making the playoffs and winning a title. It’s the bitter truth of the NBA.
No team understands the promise and the peril of a new season better than these Milwaukee Bucks, who came to San Antonio Sunday night and brought with them their unique mix of fortune and folly. They’re unquestionably a better team now, with a new coach and a discernible identity corralling their young, explosive talent. Brandon Knight has turned his career around, and players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton, and John Henson present a tantalizing vision of what the future can hold for the Bucks.
But for every hopeful development this season, Milwaukee has been confronted with some difficult challenges. They lost Jabari Parker for the season when he tore his ACL. They’ve probably lost Larry Sanders, too, though for more preventable reasons. One step forward, another step back. But the Bucks are playing with found money right now, exceeding expectations and shocking the league. Their potential neither squandered nor achieved, simply adapting new context on a nightly basis.
You saw the pieces of something great during Sunday’s game. Khris Middleton started the game with Klay Thompson hands, and the rest of the team followed his lead. Antetokounmpo was everywhere, mostly because he can’t help it with those arms, and his court vision seemed to improve by the play. This is quite the group Milwaukee has assembled, and you never got the impression that the team was playing above its head, even when their normally poor offense was maintaining a 60% field goal percentage in the first half.
The third quarter changed the game, and the Spurs responded immediately with aggression, no doubt embarrassed more by what they allowed Milwaukee to do than what Milwaukee prevented them from doing. One of the few constants for the Spurs this season has been its defense, and they dusted it off for a third quarter punctuated by big runs from both teams. The third frame has been something of a problem for the Spurs lately, but between those recent struggles and Milwaukee’s uneven offense, something had to give. In this case, it was the Spurs who took the game, mostly on the backs of Tim Duncan (20 points, 11 rebounds, three blocks) and Kawhi Leonard (19 points, 14 rebounds, three steals), the only two starters to have a positive +/- in the game. And were it not for a great game from a surprisingly aggressive Boris Diaw (14 points, three rebounds, three assists), the performances from Duncan and Leonard might have been for naught.
Diaw has played unevenly throughout this season, and some have worried about where the Spurs stand with him struggling to approximate last year’s quality of play. This is certainly a concern moving forward, but Diaw’s load should lighten with Leonard’s return and as Parker and Splitter rehabilitate into the starting lineup. (Matt Bonner started on Sunday night.) Right now, the Spurs have needed Diaw’s aggression in a way they didn’t for most of last season and really most of his time with the team. His 19.7% usage rate this month would just about tie his highest as a Spur, barely missing the 20.4% he posted in November of 2013, when he started five games as the Spurs tinkered with lineup changes on the way to their fifth title (via NBA.com). He’s clearly struggling, perhaps from a long summer, but as his usage right declines, his efficiency might increase.
The story with Diaw has always been his aggressiveness, and right now that seems to be the story of the Spurs, too. It’s difficult to separate this season’s team from the one that danced on the edge of perfection last June. You can only watch them struggle so much without catching yourself saying “last year’s Spurs would have done _____” or “last season’s team would never have _____.” But perhaps that’s what Popovich was eluding to that night in November. The Spurs don’t need to replicate last June to win another title any more than they needed to replicate, say, the win against the Blazers a week ago to beat the Bucks on Sunday. Popovich’s focus has never waned from the importance of the here and now. And for San Antonio, there is no greater lesson than this: potential realized last June won’t dictate potential achievable this season.
