At some point between the end of the ‘21 season and the start of the ‘22 season, I made a pact with myself: no more first quarters.
You have to understand, these were dark times to be a Spurs writer.
And yes, I know, as a fan myself, that those years were no more of picnic for the average fan than they were for me, but still. There’s just something about watching a beating and then having to write about it that feels vaguely abusive, especially when some of your favorite people are still involved.
Having to watch Gregg Popovich lose like that…I felt like a journalist covering Muhammad Ali’s last fights.
It didn’t matter how valiant he was, how much he tried to make something out of nothing — it just seemed kind of dirty to watch at all. We all knew what he was doing, of course.
But watching a worthy sacrifice doesn’t making it any easier. I still get misty-eyed when the Iron Giant tells Hogarth Hughes not to follow him (as if he could) before rocketing from the ground into space, and meeting the falling arc of a nuclear warhead.
There’s a reason I don’t watch the movie all the time. It would be fairly masochistic of me to do so.
But there are 82 games in a season, and someone has to cover them.
As a writing staff, you take some solace in the knowledge that you’re all in this together. You’re all having to write about it. You’re all having to dig for silver linings. And that (for this site) you’re all doing it out of some (possibly misplaced) sense of love for the team, and the sport, and the readers who are just about as miserable as you are.
But I just could not watch first quarters anymore. Not in real time.
It’s one thing to know that the Titanic is sinking; to be thrown into the middle of the chaos and do your best to make sense of it. It’s another thing altogether to watch the ship headed towards the ice-burg in the darkness. To hear the godawful scraping and know what it means. To have been watching the journey for years, and completely run out of ways to spin it.
It had to have been a very conscious decision on James Cameron’s part to make that movie a romance. How else could you get people to watch it? The wreck just cannot be the main course.
I couldn’t convince myself to watch the game at all if I started with the first quarter. The Spurs would either start taking their beating from the onset, or worse, soar to an early lead that we all knew wouldn’t last.
So I decided that I would start watching during the second quarter, finish the game, and then watch the beginning.
It was so much easier to bear when you already knew how it would end. Especially when the Spurs did miraculously pull off the win.
You could go back and break down how the positive momentum started, with the empty but understandable hope that there might be something algorithmic in those 12 minutes that could be reverse-engineered and employed more regularly.
And even the sting of defeat didn’t smart as much when you were able to initially avoid the fool’s gold of productive opening minutes.
Hell, sometimes it was even a little funny when you encountered the Spurs finding a way to lose the opening frame that you’d never even considered.
(Even though the Spurs won the game, I don’t think I’ll ever forget Jakob Poeltl picking up 2 fouls in the first 96 seconds of the Lakers game in 2022 that tied Pop with Don Nelson.)
Lately, though, I’ve been forced to reconsider my first-quarter policy, and the reason is pretty obvious: Victor Wembanyama is just too fun to be put on the back-burner in any capacity.
It was a sensible policy when the losses were piling up. Sometimes it still is.
But frustration with a contender-caliber team starting slowly is simply not enough to deprive myself of the immediacy of the joy provided by the most insane fusion of Hakeem Olajuwon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wilt Chamberlain imaginable.
Wemby just had the first *official* 50 point, 20 rebound, 8 block game in NBA history (and the first 50/20/10 in the non-assist category if you combine his steals and blocks), in his 8th game of his 4th season, and he’s the same age that Wilt was as a rookie!
Chamberlain didn’t even peak until he was 25!
That’s the territory we’re in. That’s the conversation.
And that’s in spite of existing in the era of injury and rest management. In spite of the fact that Wemby’s doing it on a team that’s good enough to have already made the Finals.
In spite of playing in an era where blocks are harder to come by, and strategic scouting and game-plans are another level, and players are (pretty successfully) bombing away from long range. In spite of an out-of-whack jumper that’s converting at about 28% outside of 10 feet.
Having chugged a 16oz energy drink during my late dinner before the game in an attempt to battle the somnolent rigidities of middle-age, I found myself doing the same ‘fighting the urge to pee’ dance that my child still breaks out every now and then, as I tried to hold out til the end of the half.
Smelling weakness through the television screen like a shark loose in a blood bank, Wemby proceeded to block three shots in roughly 13 seconds, as if to say: are you sure that you want to miss this?
I can’t remember the last time I almost wet myself over basketball, or a more satisfying pee at the half.
There’s plenty of negative things I could say about the game. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the team shoot that badly as a whole. Even Julian Champagnie and Devin Vassell couldn’t buy a shot.
There’s no reason it should have been that close with such a performance out of Wembanyama.
The bench’s defense looked like it had been coordinated by Wile E. Coyote and the Acme Corporation, and they put up a total of ten points in their relief of the starters. Carter Bryant and Tarris Reed somehow got no minutes on a night in which it couldn’t have been more clear that a shakeup was needed.
Even De’Aaron Fox’s previously next-level show of efficiency took the wrong turn at Albuquerque.
This was a bad game, if we’re being honest. A real stinker. And yet I can’t find the animosity within me to make this the all-around feel-bad roast that it should be, because, as I’ve said so many times over the last year, it just did not matter.
This should have been one of those games where I had to go back and break down the first quarter in a state of rage.
It should have been. But I just don’t have it in me to despair the undespairing.
Through it all, Wemby was completely unshaken. Understandably, so were his teammates. In their shoes, I think I’d feel the same way.
I don’t love that they frittered away lead after lead. I don’t like it as a trend, and I don’t like it as reminder.
But I think it’s easy to forget that we don’t live in that place were I can’t stand to watch the first quarter anymore, and that by resigning myself to that policy of the past, I’d be getting in the way of my own happiness.
You can’t protect yourself from pain without also protecting yourself from rapture. I think sometimes, in both life and basketball, we have a way of forgetting that.
I can tell you everything they did wrong. I can rant and rage with the best of them, and sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
I can tell you that they were saved anyway, undeservingly.
Give me a better story than that, I dare you.
Takeaways
- I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about this game, but man has Wemby really taken to the responsibility of attacking the rim this season. Right now he and Giannis are the only players in the NBA averaging 7+ Rim FGs and 8+ Paint FGs made per game. And Wemby’s actually doing it more ways than Giannis is, as the only player in the league averaging 5+ points as the P&R Roll Man, 4+ Points off of Cuts, and 4+ points In Transition, per game. If his jumper starts heating up, we’re going to see even crazier numbers than we did last night. Which is insane when you consider that he’s 4th in the league in scoring with a jumper finds the bottom of the bucket about 1/4th of time right now.
- It’s been a bit of an uncomfortable fit for Stephon Castle when all three guards are on the court at the same time, and he seems to have been asked to serve as more of an off-ball shooter because of that, but when the need arises, he always seems to find an extra gear. I know many of are hoping that the addition of Tobias Harris forces some rotation adjustments, but I will say, Castle is getting the open shots, and he’s not shrinking from the challenge. He’s shooting 32% from three now, but if he stars hitting those, that lineup might really morph into something scary, because everything will open up on the inside, and Wemby’s already mutilating the rim as it is (and Harper’s been slouch, either). And as much as I think Harris will be a boon to the team, I’d secretly prefer to see that happen instead.
- Though Fox had probably his most inefficient night of the season on the offensive end, he’s still the only player in the NBA creating 15+ Assist Points Per Game, with a 2-1 Assist-to-Turnover Ratio, while also sporting a 65+ True Shooting Percentage, which is crazy when you see all the names that miss the mark. But, just as importantly, he’s been outstanding on the defensive end, and it showed in the clutch last night when he kept the still-lethal (and long-time Spurs killer) Kyrie Irving off-balance just enough to that his attempt at a game-winning bucket. To have lost a game with Victor playing like that would have felt catastrophic, so he’d be next in line for the game ball, in my mind.
Playing You Out – The Theme Song of the Evening:
Brand New Day by Van Morrison
