Growing pains for now
Before adding veteran help, maturation period for youngsters has to be endured
NEW YORK — Like most impressionable kids, they’re always watching. Devonte’ Graham realizes this, and he also knows how eager some of those youths are to test their limits.
Graham, to be sure, is no grizzled graybeard. He’ll turn a mere 29 this month, but that makes him the oldest active member of the youngest team in the NBA. And there are moments when the generation gap smacks him in the face.
At Spurs team dinners on the road, for example, Graham can feel the eyes on him. The kids enter the restaurant with a plan to show how grown up they are, and to see what they can get away with.
“But if I order a drink and get Ided, they all get scared,” Graham says. “It’s a lot of Shirley Temples.”
Given the precociousness and sobriety of the audience, moments like this once might have made for a perfect time to impart time-honored lessons about pounding the rock, or to pass along pieces of what the Spurs call corporate knowledge, or to regale the kids with tales of championships won.
The problem is there’s nobody left to tell them. Not only does this roster lack a legend like Tim Duncan or Manu Ginobili, it lacks even a link to the glory years. Patty Mills is gone. So is almost everybody who played even a minute with him.
And as a 75-year-old head coach tries to replicate part of what he once helped build, he recognizes what no longer can be shared over Shirley Temples.
“It’s not that part of it is missing — it’s (all) missing,” Popovich says of the Spurs’ hand-me-down tradition. “So it’s kind of like the players starting the culture all over again.”
Of course, this was bound to happen eventually. Duncan can keep hanging around the practice facility, and Ginobili can keep entrenching himself into his front-office job, but they’re not on the bus, and they’re not in the locker room, and they’re not on the playing floor. Clearly, it’s getting harder and harder for 20-year-olds to see them as anything resembling peers.
In San Antonio, like in every other place, young teammates learn from old teammates. For the time being, and by design, the Spurs don’t have many of the latter.
Before last week, Doug Mcdermott was the only player over the age of 28. Then he was traded to Indiana at the deadline, which made the league’s youngest team even younger, and left Graham and Cedi Osman as the elder statesmen. Graham arrived a little over a year ago, and seldom plays.
Osman has been around since last summer.
Both try to set good examples of how to be a pro. But they hold no connections to the Spurs’ past. For that, the closest the youngsters have is Keldon Johnson, the team’s longest-tenured player.
“And I’m 24,” Johnson says, his voice climbing to its usual shout. “I’m young as hell!”
Eventually, the Spurs will start adding older pieces instead of subtracting them. Before games like Saturday’s loss at Brooklyn, Popovich acknowledges that even a team built around 20year-old Victor Wembanyama and a young core needs veterans, “but you have to figure out when’s the right time.” Part of that has to do with roster management and salarycap planning, but another part is determining when the youngsters are ready to take advantage of it.
“If we would have brought in a veteran this early, and spent money on a free agent, you’d probably figure that would be a little too early,” Popovich says. “You’d like Victor to progress a little bit more, and the team to get a little older, and then you want to do something like that. Timing is pretty important.”
But as one blowout defeat bleeds into the next, and as first-hand knowledge of the glory years slips farther and farther away, the paucity of perspective becomes more glaring.
Five of the top 11 guys in the Spurs’ regular playing rotation are in the Shirley Temple crowd, still under the legal drinking age. Couldn’t they use some help understanding what all of these losses mean, and how they fit into what the Spurs are attempting to establish? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear a voice like that coming not from a coach or a special advisor to basketball operations, but from someone in the players’ huddle?
Asked about the growth process, Wembanyama nods.
“As a young team,” Wembanyama says, “sometimes it’s hard to do without this type of guidance from veterans.”
For the next couple of months, that kind of guidance isn’t coming. With the trade deadline behind them, the Spurs are what they are until a brutal season ends.
But starting this summer, the timing Popovich discussed will look more conducive to acquiring the players who don’t get carded while ordering wine at team dinners. The Spurs should be more open to acquiring them, either in free agency or via trade, and those players will look at Wembanyama and see a chance to not only teach, but win.
On the second-youngest roster in the NBA, in Oklahoma City, some of this already is happening. Thunder general manager Sam Presti, with his links to the Spurs’ past and a long run of success at his current stop, went the Shirley Temple route for a couple of years and while waiting for the right time to add experience.
Now, two years after the Thunder lost 58 games, they’re one of the top four teams in the Western Conference. And over the past week, Presti acquired thirty-somethings Gordon Hayward and Bismack Biyombo for a playoff push.
Chances are, when the Spurs make their moves, they’ll shoot for bigger stars than that. And when they do?
The kids, older but as impressionable as ever, still will try to test their limits, and still will need to learn a few lessons.
By then they might be ready to use them.