Returning down to earth
It’s time to adjust expectations for reeling Spurs despite strong 2 months
Tomorrow is another day, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easier one. If the Spurs are honest with themselves, they’ll acknowledge things might get worse before they get better, and there are no guarantees their current slump will end before the season does.
Most people saw this coming. The problem is they saw it coming four months ago, before the kids played over their heads and the veterans rediscovered their youth and everybody redefined what success means to the Spurs in 2020-21.
In December, 30 to 35 victories, a step forward for a few recent draft picks and a handful of lottery balls would have sounded about right. Now it’s a letdown because in between then and now, the Spurs made people dream bigger, and changing dreams mid-season comes with a downside.
Namely, if you fall short of the newer, more ambitious one, some are liable to forget it never was realistic in the first place.
This is where the Spurs are now. They’re a rebuilding team with a promising but inexperienced core at least a couple of years away from contending for championships and growing into what the franchise will become next. In other words, they’re exactly what we thought they’d be, except lots of the wins we figured were coming got bunched together early, and lots of the losses we figured were coming are
piling up late.
So instead of the same expectations holding throughout, they’ve been recalibrated — twice.
First, during the season’s first few months, when the Spurs climbed to six games over .500 and looked poised to not only make the playoffs, but maybe even win a series.
Then during the last two weeks, when they lost seven of nine games on their longest homestand in history, dropped nine of 11 overall, while it became clear that counting on them to hold on to 10th place might be asking too much.
“We have a good number of people not playing very well,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said Wednesday night, summarizing a vibe and a predicament.
It’s far from too late to turn things around, and it’s true that this team has defied logic before. The Spurs have been better on the road than at home and
have played some of their best basketball of the season against superior competition. Maybe they have a rally coming.
But it’s hard to find an opportunity for one on paper. The remainder of their schedule is the second-toughest in the league in terms of quality of opposition and tied for the most grueling in terms of rest days. Even if Lonnie Walker IV returns from an injured wrist and Gorgui Dieng shakes off the sore shoulder he suffered in his first few minutes as a Spurs player, more aches and pains are sure to accumulate.
Gimme victories won’t. Under normal circumstances, the Spurs should have had plenty of those over the last couple of weeks at the AT&T Center. They were sleeping in their own beds and playing lots of teams with losing records, and it was their chance to make hay while the sun shone.
As it turns out, if they’re going to do any baling this season, it’s going to have to be in the dark. Everything went wrong at home, and while there were multiple explanations for it, the simplest was that it was bound to happen at some point.
Even when the Spurs were surprising everyone in January and February, the statistical analysts and underlying numbers suggested they weren’t nearly as good as their record looked. They were overachieving and likely would regress to their mean.
It happened more quickly than even the numberscrunchers anticipated, in part because of some tough injury luck (for which they also were due), in part because their bout with COVID-19 early in the season meant their secondhalf schedule was crammed with 40 games in 68 nights and in part because guys like Keldon Johnson hit a wall common to stars breaking out.
For this season’s oncourt odds, there are no obvious remedies. Rest isn’t coming. Over the next month, they’ll be pitted against playoff teams more often than not. Popovich might look deeper in his bench for help, but the best teams usually shrink their rotations as seasons progress, not expand them.
For the sense of dread that the recent slide has created, however, there is at least one solution. It’s to remember the expectations people had for the Spurs in December, and to realize they might have been the right ones all along.
By that standard? Even a slump can be tolerable.
Until the easier tomorrows get here.