San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Fans learning patience as the Spurs rebuild
On March 10, Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich announced that the team would be parting ways with power forward LaMarcus Aldridge after nearly six seasons together.
The most striking part of this news was the utter lack of emotion that greeted it.
After all, Aldridge had been the biggest free agent acquisition in the franchise’s history. When he declared his intent to sign with the Spurs on July 4, 2015, San Antonians were positively giddy.
During his tenure in the Alamo City, Aldridge was routinely productive, occasionally transcendent (who can forget his 34-point night in Houston to clinch the 2017 Western Conference semifinals?) and often attacked for being a lackadaisical underperformer.
But on March 10, both the euphoria of his 2015 signing and the subsequent complaints about the quality of his play felt like distant memories.
Aldridge had once been heralded as the man who would carry the baton — along with a young Kawhi Leonard — for the Spurs franchise in the post-Tim Duncan era. It didn’t quite work out that way, but Spurs fans have come to accept that disappointment with a kind of quiet resignation.
Of course, resignation isn’t the same thing as negativity. For many Spurs loyalists, it means acknowledging that we’ve been fortunate to follow a team that’s been the NBA gold standard for winning the right way. It also means accepting the reality that nothing goes up without plummeting back to earth at some point.
“I think it’s kind of inevitable,” said Chris Duel, a sports talk host at Ticket 760. “You look at the history of old teams and the ebb and flow and the
cycles.
“I think Spurs fans have been lucky, and I think Spurs fans are spoiled. I’m one of them. So I try to keep that part of me that is spoiled in check and just realize that the cycle is inevitable.”
From 1997 to 2017, the Spurs won five NBA championships and had 20 straight seasons in which they won more than 60 percent of their games. Pick any storied major league sports franchise you want — the New York Yankees, the Boston Celtics, the New England Patriots — and you can’t find a single one to match that level of sustained excellence.
If we take a broader look, beginning with David Robinson’s arrival in 1989, the Spurs made the playoffs 29 times in 30 seasons, winning at least 57 percent of their games in each of those playoff years. Even the solitary bad year during that long stretch, the 1996-97 season, was semi-tolerable.
An injured Robinson missed most of the season, and Spurs fans could console themselves with the knowledge that the next year they’d have him back, along with a high draft pick (who turned out to be Duncan).
Right now, the picture is murkier. You can see the promise of talented young players such as Dejounte Murray, Keldon Johnson and Lonnie Walker IV, but you also see a team with a porous defense and a bad habit of blowing leads in the fourth quarter.
That’s resulted in two straight losing seasons without a playoff berth.
As the team goes through its transitional, rebuilding phase, there’s a sense that some Spurs fans are hibernating. Not severing their connection, but emotionally detaching themselves for the time being.
This sense of detachment owes something to the way that COVID-19 safety protocols physically distanced sports fans from their favorite teams. But it’s also a defense mechanism for Spurs followers adjusting to the unfamiliar emotions that come with losing on a regular basis.
Bestselling author Shea Serrano, a San Antonio resident and longtime Spurs enthusiast, put it this way early last year, before the pandemic gripped the United States:
“It’s not that much fun to be on the team that nobody’s afraid of,” Serrano said. “Now we’re the team that they look past, and that kinda sucks.”
Gabe Farias, the former president of the West San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and a football commentator for Texas Sports Productions, views the Spurs’ current predicament as a simple test of patience for San Antonians.
“We’ve only known the Spurs winning,” Farias said. “Now it’s hard for people to be patient and let the process work. But this is a good young team.”
While acknowledging that there are no future Michael Jordans on the Spurs roster (or any NBA roster, for that matter), Farias made the point that even Jordan’s mythic run with the Chicago Bulls involved six years of waiting for the right pieces to come together.
“When Jordan joined the Bulls, he was great, but he was lonely. It’s a process.”
It’s telling that the most emotional moment for Spurs fans this year came not from anything related to the current team, but from Duncan’s moving Hall of Fame induction speech last month.
“I’m optimistic. I think they’ll figure something out,” said San Antonio filmmaker Jimmy Mendiola. “I don’t mind losing right now, because I’m old enough to see these things in waves.
“But I find myself revisiting players from the past. Speedy Claxton, for instance. I’ve been obsessing over him.”
Juan Miguel Ramos, a local visual artist and longtime Spurs devotee, said he finds himself less invested in the team than he once was, but he chalks up much of that apathy to the effects of the pandemic.
“I haven’t had an interest because things have been so different, so my perspective on following sports is affected,” Ramos said.
Duel pointed out that the Spurs might be competing in the playoffs right now if not for Leonard’s 2018 falling-out with Spurs management, which sabotaged a well-constructed plan for the post-Duncan era.
“I have a good feeling they will be a playoff-caliber team next season one way or the other,” he said. “I still say, ‘In Pop, we trust.’”