What’s the Story: Spurs Hold off Raptors Comeback but Lose Duncan to Injury

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  • DorieStreet

    Spurs have to do a much better job of stopping comebacks /runs at a point where the lead remains double-digits. Otherwise, a good night against a (struggling) playoff team.

  • Suave Groove

    Difficult to stop that type of comebacks. NBA’s a game of runs and Raptors made their. Also, that second half Raptors wasn’t the “struggling playoff team”. They played hard literally up to the last second where despair and frustration was such that they began to foul and stat padding their numbers when the game was visibly out of reach.

    2nd half summarized:
    1) Spurs dropped 2 gears after a 26point lead.
    2) Raptors shoot their lights out (69% FG) in the 3rd quarter.
    3) Pop was doing some strange things w/ the lineups (in less than 30secs into the 3rd, he subbed Danny for Marco and then pulled Marco for CoJo. Weird.)
    4) Later Pop played Patty-CoJo-Marco-Matt-Duncan for a while.
    5) Toronto basically played their starters all 4th quarter.
    6) Raptors’ starters beasting vs 3rd string Spurs bench. The game was pushed up to 17pts, Pop pulled out some of the guys and Raptors started to foul our bench and made some lucky threes.

    It was an awesome win for the Spurs.

  • Steve

    1) I’d say the Spurs dropped about 4 gears. They stopped playing on both ends, but especially on defense. The rotations were non-existent. Looked like they did in all of those losses. You could say they were cruising, but I would say that they probably work harder in practice. In their mind the game was already won and they weren’t even playing any more. They should have been subbed out when they stopped showing any semblance of playing defense.
    2) Raptors got clean looks because there were no defensive rotations, and they got warm and confident and when the second string came in, they stayed hot.
    3) That was actually at the start of the first quarter if I’m not mistaken. Pop looked like he stopped coaching in the 3rd quarter. The lead hit 26, and the guys just stopped playing and Pop didn’t even call a time out, much less yell at anybody or sub anybody, until the run was well underway.
    5) Normally that is where the Spurs feast, with the bench players coming with energy against tired starters - as happened in the second quarter.
    6) Yeah, after our starters surrendered 9 points of the lead, the bench came in and only surrendered 3 more points the rest of the third quarter. Starters came back in the 4th with a little more energy but still not enough and dropped another 7 points before finally pulling away with a few timely energy filled plays.

  • Steve

    Agreed. I think you can avoid getting outscored by 19 points over the span of about 16 minutes. If the starters and primary subs won’t bring the energy, put in CoJo, Baynes and Bonner. Those guys always seem ready to go and give great energy. I’d say Ayers, but Baynes and Ayers don’t play well together. Mills and Green and Kawhi would be good guys too. I saw one fast break that turned into half court that turned into a miss, because Bonner picked up the cutter, then switched onto his man, then rotated to the open man at the three point line, ran him off, then picked up another open man. He was everywhere. And he made buckets.