Mired in skid, players hold meeting
“Tired of getting their butts whooped,” the Spurs held a players-only meeting for 20-plus minutes after last Thursday’s season-worst 25-point loss at Minnesota, forward Thad Young said Monday.
After coach Gregg Popovich chastised the team for its lack of effort against the Timberwolves, the players “voiced their issues, their points” among themselves, Young said.
“Everybody put it on the table. Everybody talked,” the 15th-year pro told reporters after the Spurs’ morning shootaround in advance of Monday night’s game against Phoenix, their first since the drubbing in Minneapolis.
The 115-90 loss to the Timberwolves marked the Spurs’ fifth loss in their last six games and extended their losing streak to four games, matching a season high. Three of the defeats during the skid have been by margins of 14 points or greater.
Young said one of the best things about the clear-the-air session was that second-year pro Devin Vassell “stepped up and took the floor’ to kick start the meeting.
“He basically said, ‘Come on. Let’s try to figure this thing out. Let’s talk about it. Let’s put everything out there on the table,’ ” Young said. “That’s what you want from young guys. I could do it, but you want these younger guys to start stepping up. He did a really good job of orchestrating
it and trying to get guys to start speaking and really voicing their issues and voicing their points.”
Young said his points of emphasis in the meeting centered on the Spurs’ lack of commitment to each other on the court.
“We have to play for one another,” he said. “We still don’t truly trust one another out there sometimes on the court defensively. The biggest thing is (fearing a teammate) is not going to come with the help. Just proving we are going to be there for each other, that’s when the trust level starts to jump up.”
Tapping his chest, Young said he stressed to his teammates
“there is not going to be a change until it hits here.”
The Spurs’ 4-11 record entering Monday’s game is the franchise’s second-worst through 15 games.
“When everybody starts to feel the same way about it hitting their hearts, and it starts to weigh heavy on their hearts, that’s when we are going to have some change,” Young said. “Because that is a hard pill to swallow and a hard feeling to take care of, so you will do whatever it takes to not feel that feeling again. And that’s when we are going to see a change with what is going on on the court.”
Popovich didn’t have much to say about the meeting when asked about it before Monday’s game.
“I hope they had a great talk,” he said.
Asked if there is anything he and his staff are doing to keep the players’ spirits up, Popovich joked, “We bring them presents, cocoa puffs, try to keep them smiling, that sort of thing.” Turning serious, he added, “We practice, try to get better. We got to get older and get more habitual and more consistent. It’s a lot of young guys. You got to have patience. They are doing their best.”
Much of what has gone wrong with the Spurs lately is an “indication of a young team that’s trying to learn,” Young said.
“This situation is tough because of how we are losing games,” he said. “We are kicking ourselves in the butt by having mental lapses or having a bad quarter, those types of things. Having misreads on the defensive side of the basketball. Missed opportunities on plays coming out of timeouts.”
Despite the mounting losses, the Spurs’ spirits remain high, Young said.
“The biggest thing is that we keep going out there and keep playing hard and keep putting forth the effort,” he said. “The Minnesota game, we didn’t put out the effort we should have put out. Coach told us that coming into the locker room that we got our butts kicked and stuff like that.”