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Another impressive win for the Spurs, another injury, this time in the form of Danny Green, who's expected to miss a month with a broken finger. That's some kind of status quo the fellas have going. one that is logically unsustainable, unless Malcolm Thomas turns into a modern day Wilt Chamberlain or something, but my advice to the Spurs is to either drop a game on purpose to break the pattern or, even better, to just stop getting hurt.
Interestingly, Green tweeted this earlier today:
Good news. .. I'll be back in couple weeks http://t.co/GCcDuTgCpg
— Danny Green (@DGreen_14) January 13, 2014
Either Green is misinformed/overly optimistic about his injury (Manu Ginobili did miss a month with a similar injury in 2012, also suffered against Minnesota), or this is another example of the Spurs purposefully exaggerating the timeline of their guys' injuries, which I continue to suspect is the case with Tiago Splitter's shoulder. We'll see.
I agreed with J. Gomez, as I usually do, about his opinion of Boris Diaw's defense on Kevin Love in the game.
@Ericb1980 Diaw is great at D against shooting bigs. Tonight just wasn't necessarily the best example of it. Love just missed easy shots.
— Jesus Gomez (@JejeGomez_PtR) January 13, 2014
Still (warning: #hottake alert), I feel that people are missing the forest for the trees on this one when it comes to Love in general and the Wolves in particular. Anyone can miss a few easy shots here and there, but Love let those misses completely take him out of his whole game. Seven rebounds in only 32 minutes? Only one offensive rebound? No assists? None of those long outlets to a streaking Corey Brewer? I will credit Diaw and Co. for doing a terrific job of getting out on Love on those pick-and-pops to the three point line and making him put it on the floor, but the bottom line is that Love just didn't bring it and he mentally checked out of the game early when it was clear that he didn't have it going.
Really, the whole Wolves roster, save for Nikola Pekovic, was pathetic on Sunday. Where was Kevin Martin? He was neutralized by Kawhi Leonard, as usual. Where was Corey Brewer? 23 invisible minutes. Ricky Rubio? Chase Budinger? J.J. Barea? M.I.A. Not one of them helped out Pekovic, who was beasting against Tim Duncan.
I saw a stat last night that the T-Pups were 0-10 in games decided by four points or fewer, and it wasn't surprising at all. I know it's an accepted notion in modern statistical thinking that good teams win blowouts, bad teams lose blowouts and all close games are coin-flips that prove nothing either way, and I'll buy that if the record is 4-6 or even 3-7, but when a team is 0-10 in that stat, sorry, I'm not buying the randomness. At some point you're just mentally and physically soft as a team.
Bill Simmons and guys like that talk about how entertaining the Wolves are to watch, how they're one of the top "League Pass teams," and that's all well and good, but the bottom line is there's not one guy on that roster, including Love, who you'd go to war with in an important game. Even Barea seems to have lost the edge he had as a Maverick.
I have nothing against Rick Adelman, but I don't think he's the right coach for that team. I'm not sure anyone could be, but they're just not buying what he's selling, especially on their own end of the floor. There's enough talent there to be a playoff team, but they're just not tough enough, and it was embarrassing how the Spurs, shorthanded as they were, manhandled them the way they did in that second half. They just didn't compete at all, and at times the Spurs made them foolish, like on this sequence with Tony Parker and Matt Bonner. Meanwhile, the Spurs are 14-1 (and counting) when one or more of their top guys is out.
