Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
San Antonio will be coming into this season with a new look, but the focus should be the frontcourt. But this summer, Gregg Popovich and the Spurs went full cannonball into the free agency pool, making a mega splash by nabbing the biggest fish. Happy basketball, San Antonio.
The Spurs enter the year as definite title contenders.
New faces. New individual styles and personalities. Injuries were a major factor – center Tiago Splitter missed the first month with a calf injury, forward Kawhi Leonard lost a month to a torn ligament in his hand and while point guard Tony Parker stayed in the lineup, he wasn’t himself because of a lingering hamstring injury.
Now, I hate to take anything away from the preseason other than the fact that Jeremy Lin’s new hairstyle was an even worse decision than Vince Vaughn being cast for season two of True Detective, but Marjanovic can move surprisingly well for a player of his size. The Spurs are stacked, smart and deep yet again.
Lee said: “I’m looking to go out there and press the issue a little bit and be aggressive to help our team get off to a good start”.
It will take time for San Antonio’s rotation to fall into place, though. The Spurs were punished for their clinical ability to turn unknown players and perceived also-rans into viable rotation players in the offseason, for Cory Joseph, Marco Belinelli and Aron Baynes all received massive salary bumps the Spurs couldn’t match. Jahlil Okafor looked great with 26 points in his rookie debut, but he also turned the ball over 8 times.
Duncan has averaged 19.5 points and 11.0 rebounds a game for his career but last season had 13.9 points and 9.1 rebounds and was involved in only 22.2 percent of Spurs’ plays, a career low. In fact, the Spurs haven’t won fewer than 55 games over the past three seasons, although the only reason why they didn’t win 55-plus games in 2011-12 was because it was a strike-shortened season. The trio of DeMar DeRozan, Kyle Lowry and Jonas Valanciunas combined to score 69 points for the Raptors, more than enough.
With about 6 minutes left in the third, Popovich put in the bench players, and we got to see a rare early season exhibition of Boris Diaw using his agility and cleverness to get past, under and around players much quicker than him. The Spurs used the offseason to answer.
