Aging Spurs still major threat to crash Finals party
With the San Antonio Spurs in the midst of an uncharacteristic late-season losing streak last week, a reporter suggested to coach Gregg Popovich that his players appeared to be dazed while sitting on the bench. "That's just horse(bleep)," Popovich said. "It's the same guys that have been here 12 years. They have that same look whether they win or lose, win a championship or lose a championship. Because we lose more doesn't mean that same look is daze. We look the same way when we win.
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| You can always count on the Spurs making a mad dash in the postseason. (Getty Images) |
Right now, the Spurs are sitting in the middle of the muddled Western Conference playoff picture and it's difficult to tell whether the defending champions are serious contenders to repeat or an aging group whose best days might be behind them.
In years past, including some of the championship years, the Spurs had some rough patches, but they always seemed to hit their peak in the second half of the season.
That appeared to be the case earlier this month when the Spurs ran off 11 straight wins, but then they dropped six of seven, including four straight. Although the Spurs will take a three-game winning streak into Tuesday night's game at Orlando, those wins came against a pair of sub-.500 teams (Chicago and Sacramento) and a struggling Dallas Mavericks team that played without star forward Dirk Nowitzki in the fourth quarter.
"We were doing pretty good at the beginning of the season, but then we've had too many up and downs," guard Manu Ginobili said. "We're trying to find a way. We have a month [before the playoffs begin] and, hopefully, we click at the right time.
"But right now, we're not there."
Ginobili believes the Spurs' winning streak a few weeks ago was a bit of a mirage.
"We've had some wins, but I'm not so sure that we were playing that good, at a playoff level," he said. "We won too many games on a last-second shot that we shouldn't have won like that. We should have taken care of business before. I don't think we were so good then, we're not so bad now."
Even though the Spurs are tied for fifth place in the West and, barring upsets, wouldn't have home-court advantage in any round of the playoffs, everyone is confident they can get back to the Finals -- regardless of home court -- if they start playing up to their capabilities.
"Of course, it's important and I would prefer to play games at home all the time, especially in the Finals," Ginobili said. "But it doesn't mean anything if you get the No. 1 [seed]. You just have to play well when it counts. We've won Game 7s, we've lost Game 7s, it's a matter of playing well when it counts."
Home court usually is a huge factor in the NBA playoffs, but the race out West has been bucking trends all season.
"It might be a tougher route, more games might have to be played, but you'd make a pretty good bet if you said the [team] that's seeded first in the West won't come out of the West," Popovich said. "That would be a decent bet because the eighth seed could be as good as the first.
