San Antonio’s Defense is Atrocious
One of the staples of San Antonio’s championship teams was defense. No matter how much they struggled, everyone, including their opponents, knew that the Spurs could play lock down D at any given time. San Antonio’s struggles this season, especially on the road, is not from a lack of offense.
Ok, maybe a little bit, but they have absolutely struggled to play defense both on the road and at home. This team, ever since Bruce Bowen left, has been lacking a stopper. Gary Neal has played well, but he has definitely not been as effective as Bruce Bowen was.
Bowen was an up in your face, hands all over, do whatever it takes to play defense defender. San Antonio is lacking that physicality, and it is painful to watch at times. They can score with the best, averaging the third best points per game so far at 100.9. However, their defense is atrocious, giving up 96.7 points per contest.
Look back at those banner years, San Antonio would give up somewhere around 88-92 points per game. Even though they were not scoring at quite a prolific pace, their defense was playing awesome.
So how do the Spurs start playing better defense?
First, they have got to get back to fundamentals. It isn’t about any one player, it’s about a team. Tim Duncan is not quite as agile as he once was, and he’s been slow on rotation at times. Other plays have to keep their offensive player out of the lane.
Secondly, those players have to rotate and help better. Timmy is also included here, as he’s been late, and so have others. Greg Popovich’s teams have always rotated, communicated, and played stronger defense. It just has not happened this year.
The leaders on this Spurs team, Parker and Duncan (and Ginobili when healthy) know that there defense has been poor, and are not shying away from it. I’m sure they have vowed extra attention to it. Let’s hope that it pays off in the coming months.
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