Calling Vassell a #4 on a good team is drastically underselling him imo. By the time the Spurs are good he will be good enough to easily be the #3. Maybe even a #2b if he continues to improve.
What sucks is that Flagg will not yet declare for the draft next season... which means Spurs will still tank for 2/3 more seasons to get him.. it's gonna be a painful rebuild if that's the scenario
Calling Vassell a #4 on a good team is drastically underselling him imo. By the time the Spurs are good he will be good enough to easily be the #3. Maybe even a #2b if he continues to improve.
Wemby changed TWICE teams between 16 and 18 because he thought it wasn't the right place for his ambition and some of you think he'll hesitate to push for a trade?
It'll never go public, not his education, at best it'll be insinuated.
He'll also never backstab the Spurs, meaning he'll try his best to lobby before taking the radical option.
A professional sports coach is expected to pull out more wins post #1 draft pick than the season before getting the aforementioned #1 pick, true or false?
i wouldve assumed pops wife but she got over herself
made that same joke years ago when it was way too soon and was in poor taste. im ok with it now
To fully rebuild, we must take the team all the way down to zero wins
I'd rather go Naz Reid since TWolves will have to get rid of someone due to their cap situation and then one of Trey Murphy or Herb Jones because both want to start and NOLA needs to improve some other areas.
Trae/Devin/Herb/Naz/Wemby would be a legit team and Spurs would still have some assets left.
A couple of veterans for the bench. Clean house from these charity cases and scrubs with no fundamentals.
Tre can stay, others not so much. Maybe Sidy develops.
I’m new to the Windhorst experiment, but I kinda am left feeling like he’s mostly full of /conjecture/restating obvious things. But people like him for some reason, and God knows it’s not his Java the Hutt looks. Maybe he’s on to something?
Zach Lowe essentially validating Windhorst provides a lot of credibility for me, personally.
^ Zach Lowe for sure. Didn’t realize he said it too.
Lowe didn’t seem to be referring to any inside knowledge he had tbh
i miss columnist Lowe. Now he’s just typical talk very loudly and animated on tv guy
The spurs didn't really get worse, it's just that all those other teams stop tanking and are now trying to win and/or they had players and coaches take a leap and we didn't.
Last year lots of teams were driving 40 mph trying to get Victor. Now that's over. They are back to driving 60 mph. It's just that the Spurs are still driving 40 mph.
Agree, but Lowe is still the best of that group of analysts in my view (Simmons, windhorse, rosillo, etc).
We're not hearing anything about Wemby not believing in Pop, so I don't know that we should expect a new coach next year. If coaching is the "real problem", how far do people expect the team to improve if they make modest changes and keep the same braintrust intact?
I'm not actually anti-Windhorst. Dude's worked hard to carve out a legit career. He does have a tendency to "paint a picture" with what he hears rather than just sharing a rumor. That means he can mischaracterize things even if there are real elements he hears.
It would worry me if Wemby is comparing himself to Chet. I'm not going to set aside any discussion of Wemby's psychology, both because I don't presume to know him and because even speculating would make sense in a different thread when I have more time. But that segment felt weird where Windhorst compared the Spurs to the Thunder as if Chet "had a better supporting cast". Chet IS the supporting cast. SGA is the MVP candidate. The idea that the Spurs should be able to put a guy like SGA around Wemby in a year rather than "build like Presti did" -- it's weird man. It makes way more sense to compare SGA to Wemby to show why taking the time to build correctly pays dividends. As I've said before, there are options for how the Spurs could be a contender next year. It would require drastic action, and the result would be that Wemby is the Robin to some proven Batman.
There are two questions here: 1) Does Wemby want Young? 2) If the Spurs get Young and it doesn't work, is Wemby going to be understanding and stay committed to the team, or is he going to dip like so many stars did in similar situations? 1) Seems like a yes, though that could be the result of heuristic bias. 2) Is a much more complicated question, but it's one that is important to get a handle on. If Wemby is going to extert his influence over the front office to change away from their plans and do what he (a 20-year-old who definitely isn't a GM) wants, will he take responsibility for the trades not working out?
We don't know how PATFO plans to get out of this situation. They seemingly made a strong decision to play for the top of this draft. They also made the strong decision to not bring in any vets. Do they think that will work out? If they really like someone in this class -- like him like they liked Kawhi. They should stick with that. They could be drafting Primo 2.0, but you have to either let them do that or fire them. You trust Wright's vision or you get a new GM. You can't make panic deals because your rookie has enough compe ive spirit to not want to lose games.
I find it funny people don't understand this and I just assume no one literally followed him or watched him play until he got to San Antonio.
The exact thing fans are trying to convince himself that he won't do...he has literally already done twice before being old enough to legally drink a beer
It's like women who get in a relationship with a man...who was already in a relationship with another woman...but then being like "but he won't cheat on me" when he cheated on the last woman to be with the woman who thinks he won't cheat on her...
And this team is unfathomably bad. Had we drafted anybody other than Wemby we would be entering worst team of all time territory.
May want to consider what Wemby is ACTUALLY saying:
https://clutchpoints.com/spurs-victo...eous-alexander
It doesn't really matter if Wemby compares himself to Chet or not, the league will. The NBA is built on rivalries and the league has anointed Chet as Wemby rival. Nothing Wemby can do about that. Doesn't matter how he feels about it every time they play each other these types of segments are going to be done and they are always going to be compared until one guy pulls away in production or accolades. Very much the same way that Chris Paul and Deron Williams were always seen as "rivals" as to who was the best point guard in the league until Williams fell of a cliff. Much the same way as Chris Paul and Steph were considered "rivals" until Steph destroyed him so many time and won so much and Chris never won anything. That's the way the league markets it's players.
And I don't understand where you guys get this "spurs made a strong decision to play for the top of the draft" from. Pop said out of his own mouth multiple times on media day that winning was a priority this season. So there are only 2 things that can be true about this whole the spurs are tanking stuff. Either Pop was just flat out lying when he said winning was important this year, which could be true, or Pop actually thought all the dumb he did as a coach this season was going to work and he actually thought these scrub ass players were going to take some sort of leap and when they didn't he was just stuck losing a ton of games.
I also disagree with them making a decision to not bring in vets. You don't "bring in" nba players. They choose to sign to your team. Why would any veteran player choose to play for the Spurs? They have an old fossil coach who isn't very good and seems to have one foot in one foot out, they are a small market, San Antonio is not a destination city, and the team has gotten worse every year for 5 years. Who would want to play under those conditions? If a veteran player is getting offered 40 million dollars to play in San Antonio, Dallas, Boston, or New Jersey, why would they pick San Antonio?
On the other hand Thad Young is a vet. Pop pretty much didn't play him when he was here. Demare Carroll was a vet. Straight up released him. Graham is a vet. He never plays. Doug was a vet. Literally the only player they traded. So maybe you are right. Pop doesn't even play the vets that he does have on the bench so what would make us think he would try to sign anything. Looks like he played his cards wrong though because the Spurs are being lt on fire from all angles right now. This front office had better crush it in the off season or this team might actually end up in Austin by 2034.
I never understand the hype for Austin here. It's a third-tier market that will never be able to compete with even the Orlandos, Charlottes, of this league.
Neither do I but there seems to be this thought process that if you put a pro sports team in Austin it will make bank. Maybe its because of how well the Longhorns games sell out...but damn near every college game sells out so who knows. Also the thought is maybe the young Holts would actually be open to moving the team for who knows what reason.
Let’s all dispatch with the false dichotomy that the only choices the Spurs had this offseason were to be terrible, or to overpay for scrubs like FVV and Dillon Brooks. The expectations that we missed were not lofty, like making the second round of the playoffs or something… it was simply to be better than last year… last year, the franchise’s 3rd worst ever. The bar was set as literally as it could go.
We would not have had to make “costly mistakes” to achieve this goal. We could have signed a capable PG. We could have added a little more veteran depth. We could have just played the PGs and vets we have.
So who is responsible for this? The GM, and the Coach/President.
Chinook asked/posited the two questions/thoughts that matter most, IMO:
If coaching is the "real problem", how far do people expect the team to improve if they make modest changes and keep the same braintrust intact?
You trust Wright's vision or you get a new GM.
I continue to ask, and the only answer I’ve gotten is from Fuzzy, who is pleased with how they are handling Wemby, but I’ll ask again:
1) What has Pop shown in his entire career to give us confidence that he develop a young team/rebuild a team from scratch? What about his recent performance (call it the last decade) that gives us confidence that he can adapt to the modern game?
2) What has Brian Wright and the rest of the FO done to give confidence that they can assemble a team/rebuild a team from scratch. I’ll give him a lot of great, he gets an A+ for taking a team down to the studs and stocking the war chest… but that’s the easy part. What has he done in San Antonio or Detroit (LOL) to signal that he is the right guy? I do give Brian a little bit of a pass because we don’t know how much autonomy he really has, or if his boss is still pulling the strings.
Now do San Antonio
Highest usage rate means nothing when it isn't being utilized correctly... He doesn't have an offense built around him... He often scores on difficult shots and doesn't get the ball in schemes that take advantage of his versatility.... Many times he ends up just forcing difficult shots because we don't have a real offensive structure
Agree on all points. Wemby's been playing Chet for years, the media constantly compares them, and he gets matched up against him whenever they play. He's also savvy enough to know that great individual players get beat by great organizations all the time. If OKC wins the le in the next 3-4 years and the Spurs aren't either a serious contender or look like they're well on the way to building one, you're going to hear that clock tick louder and louder. The last thing Wemby wants is to be remembered as this generation's Wilt Chamberlain compared to Chet Holmgren's Bill Russell.
I think everyone all around would be happy if the Spurs simply looked like a team on the rise. It’s assumed we are by some fans, simply by virtue and having Wemby and a lot of draft capital, but we are worse and until we actually start improving we won’t be a team on the rise.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)