SAN ANTONIO — Remember what the Spurs told us last fall during their annual Media Day? I do. They told us, lots of them told us, that the season was about winning. Simple. There would be continued development, but the season was about winning.
As it's turned out, the season has been about nothing but losing, basically.
I’ve asked myself several times as we’ve watched this dismal season play out, have the Spurs "taken us for a ride" with that promise? I don’t think so. I think they really believed the season would be much more competitive. Now maybe they didn’t read much about the still very-stacked Western Conference before training camp started, but we digress.
So the question is why? What has gone so terribly wrong this season? (The Spurs were the first NBA team eliminated from postseason contention.) There haven’t been any season-ending injuries for any of their frontline starters. (Charles Bassey had a bad-luck injury for sure in mid-December, but he’s not that sort of difference maker, at least not yet.)
So was Victor Wembanyama supposed to carry San Antonio to 40-50 wins by himself? Well, of course not. But it was definitely obvious in the first third of the regular season that his teammates didn’t quite understand that everything needed to run through the 7-foot-4 guy. The switch did eventually flip on that and we did see some results here and there, but nothing sustained.
And I’m not gonna be foolish enough to offer some deep intellect into the X’s and O’s, because I’m not in the building nor am I in the coaching business, but it is going to be very interesting to see what Brian Wright has in his GM bag of tricks just games away from the offseason by the middle of next month.
There are pieces to work with, obviously, but it seems likely that several parts of the current roster are gonna flip between now and the next training camp. The Spurs have cash in hand to work with this summer. (They had it last summer, too.) So it feels like the real roster building will start after the regular season finale on April 14.
Everybody wants to pair Wemby with one of the available free agents this summer, or maybe pull off a trade with all the capital they have to work with.
But it hasn’t been the Spurs' way to get crazy with things like that. They’ve always preferred to build from within as much as possible. However, they’re not gonna be interested in development much longer.
I’m not suggesting what you may be thinking, that they need to keep Victor happy, but that might not be the worst idea of all time. Every league superstar seems to have their "camp" in their ear at all times. This summer is the time to get the right people around Wemby. And that’s not any measure of Earth-shattering news. Everyone knows this. The Spurs know it better than anyone.
I don’t think any of us thought the Spurs would be in the 2024 NBA Lottery mix, at least going off their training camp comments before the season, but yet, here we are. San Antonio has the worst record in the West with only the Wizards and Pistons with worse records in the East.
They say the 2024 NBA Draft doesn't have the star power compared to what's expected in 2025, but wouldn’t it be something if the stars aligned for San Antonio again? That would really get the NBA conspiracy theorists going. But that’s the June drama we’re gonna have to get excited about with the letter ‘e’ already by their name in the league standings.
And oh yeah, the NBA’s Western Conference. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. But if Brian Wright gets as lucky this summer with free agents and/or trades as he did with ping pong balls last year, his Spurs could start making their climb up the standings.
