Every NBA team, even the best, hits a rough patch at some point or another. January is a common time considering players are starting to get tired but the All-Star break is still a month away, and a second
wind can be hard to come by. The Spurs are currently entrenched in such a slump, losing six of their last 10 games, but they aren’t the only ones. Look no further than the fact that they’re just a half game second seed in the West (after Denver won last night) because fortunately for them, the other four times competing in that 2-6 range have had their own issues as well.
Still, the Spurs had a relatively comfortable cushion on the second seed for a while, and they’ll keep sliding down if things don’t change soon. They only way to get out of slump is to just keep playing and make it happen, and that’s something we’re all waiting for. Here are some of the most obvious reasons for their recent struggles and how they can fix them. (Stats are courtesy of Basketball-Reference.)
Three-point shooting
This is probably the first thing that jumps into everyone’s mind, and with good reason. In the first 30 games of the season, when the Spurs went 23-7, they were outscoring their opponents by 7.1 points per game. Part of that difference included outscoring their opponents at the three-point line by hitting 13.6 threes per game at a respectable 36.7% rate, while allowing 12.8 threes. In the 10 games since, the Spurs have made just 10.8 threes per game at a miserable 28.4% clip, while their opponents have been making 15 threes per game on 36.6% shooting.
That’s a massive shift that goes from the Spurs having a 2.4-point per game advantage from the arc over their opponents to being outscored by 6.5 points per game, good for a nearly 9-point swing in the wrong direction. Considering three of their six losses have been by 5 points or less, it’s not hard to imagine that slightly better shooting would mean they’d still be comfortably ahead of the bunch in the 2nd seed.
It’s easy to point to Harrison Barnes as the main culprit, who went from shooting 40.1% from three in the first 30 games to only 21.4% and two fewer makes per game since, but they reality is everyone has been struggling, with Keldon Johnson being the only one who has been steady across the board. (And all the credit in the world to his consistency, but the Spurs can’t survive with him as their most reliable shooter since his main strength is inside.) Shooting slumps happen to everyone, but it’s pretty brutal when it’s all at the same time.
Fix: Perhaps to the chagrin of fans sometimes, the answer is to just keep shooting until you make it. For the Spurs, the challenge is to not get too three-happy and jack up too many, but find that balance to keep defenses honest while opening up the driving lanes. When it was working earlier in the season, the Spurs were hard to stop.
Guards struggling to score
It’s not just one area of the floor the Spurs are struggling to score, but the entire backcourt as well. De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper are in shooting slumps (although the latter two might have had semi-breakouts in OKC). Even one strength they all share — finishing at the rim — has been a struggle of late. Some of this can be tied to the three-point shooting struggles from wings resulting defenses being able to stay home, but it’s also a result of decision making.
Between the thee guards, usually two of them are on the floor at once, often taking turns on who is the ball-handler, which at times can result in a lot of standing around and stagnant offense while they look for a driving lane. If the offense is going to be centered around their drives, then they need to make their shots on the drive, and the threes from their outlet passes need to start falling. Again, too many slumps are overlapping and building off of each other.
Fix: Besides the usual “just make your shots”, the Spurs seem to be at their best when Fox is the main ball handler and Castle is a secondary creator who thrives in the catch-and-drive but not so much as the main ball handler since he’s prone dribbling into trouble. The solution is put Fox on fulltime point guard duty and play Castle off the ball. Some may say this will hinder Castle’s development, but it’s worth asking if his future is at point guard, or if he’s actually a shooting guard.
(This has also helped highlight the value of Devin Vassell, who has missed the last 8 games with an adductor strain. He may not be the flashiest player on the roster, but he’s a steady hand who doesn’t always need the ball and can create his own shot anywhere on the court.)
Opponents are taking them more seriously
There’s one more key difference between games 30 and 31: the Spurs had the world’s attention. The NBA Cup is fun but not taken too seriously (there has been zero correlation between the winners and eventual NBA champions so far), but the Spurs still caught some eyes by beating the Lakers in the quarterfinals and Thunder in Vegas. But things really took off when they showed Vegas was no fluke by beating the Thunder two more times a week later, both at home and on the road, and in relatively dominant fashion.
That was when the world started seeing them as a problem, and perhaps not so coincidently, when the Spurs’ struggles began. The defense has been elite, especially when Victor Wembanyama is on the floor , but the offense looks like it ran into a brick wall. We’ve already listed a lot of reasons why, but it’s also just teams bringing their best to beat one of the best: something they haven’t had to do against San Antonio since at least 2019, and something the Spurs need to adjust to.
Fix: This is a new reality that only a select few players on this team has dealt with, so veterans like Barnes, Fox and Luke Kornet need to continue to step up and help guide their younger, more inexperienced teammates through it. No one is going to come into games against the Spurs without taking them seriously anymore, so it’s up them to “embrace the hate” and return the favor.
The Spurs will find their way out of this because that is what good teams do, it’s just a matter of when and what it will take. A rare three-game homestand awaits them, and while they didn’t take the one that kicked off this 10-game slump as seriously as they should have, they should now after the gauntlet of a schedule they just ran around the eastern half of the country. For now, everything is still up for grabs, but they need to figure things out soon if they don’t want to find themselves looking up at anyone else besides the Thunder in the standings.
