Spurs Falter, Hope to ‘Keep Living’ Another Day
SAN ANTONIO — The Spurs locker room felt almost shellshocked as the final minutes of Thursday ticked toward the midnight hour. One by one, players made their way to a small, designated area to speak to media in very procedural fashion. There was very little milling around, no ancillary conversation you usually find post-game. They had a plane to catch, after all — a plane they had hoped would have no reason to leave the runway on this night.
The Clippers’ 102-96 Game 6 win left us with yet another twist in a series full of inexplicable turns. Each team has now lost two home games, and it’s all happening in such strange fashion: Spurs stalwarts Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili have been flat-out bad; Los Angeles missed 20 consecutive 3-pointers during a stretch that bridged Game 5 and 6; Kawhi Leonard, who once looked unstoppable in this series, had one of his worst games in recent memory (3-of-15 from the field, no steals, no blocks, four turnovers); Chris Paul and Blake Griffin continue to play massive minutes, yet somehow find the energy to remain unstoppable in the fourth quarter; Marco Belinelli had a career night with seven 3-pointers, and his team lost. When you put it all together, it’s difficult to make sense out of the current situation.
That situation? A Game 7. Most folks’ favorite two words in sports. Save for the fans involved, perhaps, who have to endure the stress in a different form than the nonpartisan viewer. After all, those two words still make Spurs fans cringe, despite exorcising demons a year ago.
But if you were to rewind Thursday evening in your head to the second quarter, you would feel San Antonio was in a good place. The Spurs bounced back from what was at one time a seven-point deficit in the first quarter to take a lead and stretch it to as many as 10 points halfway through the second. Then things started to go awry.
Gregg Popovich elected to use the dreaded Hack-a-Shaq strategy on Clips big man DeAndre Jordan, who is just an awful free-throw shooter. The Spurs intentionally fouled the former Aggie on four consecutive possessions, resulting in four makes and four misses. But his fourth trip to the line never should’ve happened.
Following a Boris Diaw layup at the 6:20-mark of the second quarter, Popovich and assistant coach Ettore Messina both leapt off the bench and waved their arms furiously, signaling NO FOUL, NO FOUL! He wanted to play straight up from there. The only problem was, the player closest to Jordan wasn’t looking.
Tim Duncan turned around and found the Clippers’ center, reached out, and purposefully committed his second foul as Popovich put his hands to his head in disbelief. Jordan would miss one of those two free throws, but the damage had been done.
“It was a hand signal and it was my fault,” Duncan admitted after the game. “I was actually looking the other direction when he said ‘No.’ I looked over and he was calling a play. I mistook it for what it was. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just some miscommunication on my part.”
In a vacuum, at the time, it wasn’t a big deal. But in the grand scheme of things, it was like a rock hitting your windshield — it makes just a small crack, but it’s never long until the glass spiderwebs.
Duncan picked up his third foul on an And-1 opportunity for Jordan just a little more than two minutes later in a seven-point game. He would have to head to the bench, and against that team with that front-court, the snowball effect began immediately.
A gimpy Tiago Splitter was no adequate replacement for Timmy, and the Clippers finished the half on an 11-4 run to tie the game. The momentum clearly shifted from there. Los Angeles wouldn’t give up the lead the rest of the way thanks to unbelievable shot-making and a combination of good defense and missed opportunities from San Antonio. Belinelli tried his damnedest to bring his team back with 3-pointer after 3-pointer, but it was never quite enough. Paul and Griffin were simply too good when it mattered most.
The in-game and post-game conversation inevitably shifted toward Popovich’s decision to intentionally foul Jordan. It’s a strategy that’s been under heavy fire this season, and when results happen the way they did Thursday, the criticism will be plentiful.
“We’ve done it before and won and you don’t ask that question,” Popovich remarked after the game when asked whether the strategy backfired. “It’s irrelevant.”
Note: The question is pretty regularly asked, even after wins.
It’s an easy angle to take, bashing a strategy that’s already unpopular on a large scale. But on this night, I’m not sure the criticism is justified. From the time Pop decided to intentionally foul to the time he elected to stop, only to have Duncan mistakenly repeat the process, the Spurs actually expanded their lead from nine points to ten. Had it not been for a pair of missed Duncan free throws, the lead would’ve expanded to 12 points.
Still, the counterpoint to that would be the idea that, had they never begun to foul Jordan in the first place, Duncan wouldn’t have picked up that silly second foul. But that’s revisionist history, an indirect result of the strategy that can’t really be attributed to Popovich’s decision. That was on Tim. And Duncan is used to playing with fouls, anyway — he’s done so very well over the course of his career. Miscommunication can happen at any point, in many circumstances; but because it happened under those circumstances, the decision is pounced upon.
What’s difficult to measure is how the strategy affects the other aspects of the game. Does the offense lose its flow? Does the defense become disengaged? Does that sort of dynamic cause stress, even for the team doing the fouling?
Popovich believes the strategy works, and that even as it appears in the moment to be backfiring (whether true or not), he’s going to stick with it. It’s like blackjack. If you’re going to play the percentages, you’ve got to do so consistently. You can’t bounce back and forth. Regardless, the Spurs went to a bad place when Duncan hit the bench in the final four minutes of the second quarter.
“It was a big stretch. We kind of weathered Belinelli getting hot there in the first half … That’s a big emphasis for us and we didn’t do a great job tonight of taking away their 3s, but we showed enough resolve to get back in the game,” J.J. Redick said. “We talked at halftime about getting off to a great start in the third quarter. We were able to do that. I don’t know if that won us the game because they came back after that too, but that was a big stretch for us.”
Weird trends that have caused the Spurs much grief in this series were on display yet again on Thursday: Parker’s jumper is gone at the moment — he finished with just eight points on 12 shots — and the Clippers are sagging off all San Antonio pick-and-rolls because of it; Green (seven points on 3-of-9 shooting) can’t hit a 3-pointer to save his life; the Spurs, as a team, just can’t seem to hit free throws anymore, going 12-of-21 from the line to push their series average to 68.4 percent; and lastly, the most sobering recurring theme is the total ineffectiveness of Manu.
The always gracious Ginobili was uncharacteristically one of the last players to address the media. He had just three points on a single 3-pointer, one rebound, and one assist in 14 minutes. In crunch time, he wasn’t on the floor. There seemed to be a different reality running through his mind and across his face on this night than there typically is. Manu was asked if there was a feeling that the end was near for a few things around this franchise.
“It’s something that you’ve got to be thinking. I don’t know what is going to happen,” Ginobili said. “What I do know is there’s going to be a Game 7 in two days. And that’s the only thing I can manage. That’s the only thing I can think of. That’s the only thing I can take care of.”
There is no such thing as momentum in this series. We’ve left each game thinking we had a grasp of what was happening, only to have our supposed expertise flipped around and thrown in our face. All six contests have been their own unique animal, and any crazy thing can happen in a Game 7 situation like the one the two sides will enter on Saturday. San Antonio has already won twice at Staples, and it’ll have to win a third time to keep this crazy season alive, and potentially, an era.
“I’ll try to do my best, the team is going to try to do their best,” Manu said before parting ways with the few remaining reporters.
“And from there, you keep living.”
