Spurs of the Moment

The Spurs did what they’ve done all year long – beat the crap out of bad teams, then proceed to crumble against the real competition. Golden State is now 19-50 and Atlanta is now 45-24. The Spurs are 41-27 and hanging onto the 7th seed in the West. A lot of good it will do if they don’t learn to beat good teams in the next couple of weeks.

Golden State
This was actually not a bad game, although the Spurs did give up 116 points. They still managed to score a whopping 147 of their own while resting Tim Duncan for most of the game – he had 17 points in just under 14 minutes. It’s hard to complain about a game when your team wins by 31 points and shoots 65% in the game. The problem is that the Spurs are more likely to have a team score 116 points on them again than they are of scoring 147 or shooting at that high a clip any time soon. I’m not thrilled about Monta Ellis (39 points) and Corey Maggette (30 points) going off for half their team’s points all by themselves, but then again, without Stephen Curry in the lineup, someone had to score for the Warriors. Eight Spurs scored in double figures and Ginobiliand RJ continued to be a nice high-scoring tandem with 20-point games each.

Atlanta
This was looking like a good game until the Spurs kept letting Atlanta back into it and then couldn’t score in the final minutes to avoid going into overtime. Ginobili had 38 points, and Tim Duncan had a double-double with 29 points and 13 rebounds. RJ only had 12 points, but added eight rebounds and four assists. Part of the problem was Matt Bonner being in the game in the final moments with his usual defensive-liability-self. He may as well have just taken a seat at midcourt when Atlanta had the ball, that would have at least been less embarrassing. Al Horford had 22 points an 18 rebounds for the Hawks who dominated the Spurs on the offensive glass 21-11. I think we could have used a little more than 12 minutes of DeJuan Blair, then again he got called for a silly tech that didn’t help matters any. 

Playoffs or No?
Tim Duncan said after the Atlanta loss, “I feel we gave this one away. With the stretch that we have, we can’t give any away.” Let’s look at that stretch, shall we? These are the remaining games on the  schedule:

@ Oklahoma City (42-26)
vs LA Lakers (52-18)
vs Cleveland (56-15)
@ Boston (45-24)
@ New Jersey (7-62)
vs Houston (36-32)
vs Orlando (49-21)
@ LA Lakers (52-18)
@ Sacramento (24-46)
@ Phoenix (44-26)
vs Memphis (37-33)
@ Denver (47-23)
vs Minnesota (14-56)
@ Dallas (46-23)

So the Spurs have only three games left against sub-.500 teams, and only six home games remaining. Did I mention that Houston and Memphis are only five games behind San Antonio right now? I know that the Spurs have beaten most of these teams at least once this season, but they’ve also lost to several of them once as well. Just something to think about…