How will the San Antonio Spurs play so many guards?

The San Antonio Spurs may have lost Danny Green and Tony Parker from the backcourt this offseason, but their roster is still disconcertingly guard-heavy.

Last year was the first in which head coach Gregg Popovich truly embraced small-ball. After primarily playing lineups featuring two big men together for nearly two decades, Pop changed, more out of necessity than anything else.

The 2017-18 San Antonio Spurs roster only had three true bigs on it: LaMarcus Aldridge, Pau Gasol and Joffrey Lauvergne (excluding two-way contract recipient Matt Costello, who played 32 minutes all season). The argument could be made that Davis Bertans is a “big,” since he almost exclusively plays power forward, but his play-style is more akin to that of a wing.

Though Pop still regularly started Aldridge and Gasol together when healthy, he still used a lot of lineups with Bertans, Rudy Gay or Kyle Anderson at the 4. In fact, Basketball-Reference estimates that last season, those three played 92, 84 and 37 percent of their minutes at power forward, respectively.

This season may end up being a continuance of that trend, but it may be the backcourt that’s going smaller instead of the frontcourt. After the Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green trade (and pending a very possible Manu Ginobili re-signing), there are a lot of players that deserve minutes at either the 1 or 2. In no particular order:

Even with Brandon Paul being waived, this is still a lot of players. Clearly, eight players can’t split minutes at two positions, so something’s got to give. In other words, someone (or multiple someones) will have to play a lot of minutes at small forward.

This article from Air Alamo attempting to project the San Antonio Spurs’ rotation for the upcoming year projects that Murray and DeRozan will start in the backcourt, with Bellinelli at the 3. However, given that DeRozan is a good deal taller and heavier than Bellinelli, it would make sense for DeRozan to be the small forward.

DeRozan has never played more than 40 percent of his minutes at small forward in a single season, other than a fluky 2013-14 when he regularly played next to the similarly sized Terrence Ross. Even if he played 100 percent of his minutes at the 3 for the Spurs, that doesn’t solve the logjam completely.

Let’s even assume Ginobili either retires or only plays at the 3. That still leaves six players for two positions.

Murray is a lock to start, as the best young player currently on the San Antonio Spurs. Bellinelli could start at the 2, or Patty Mills could start and push Murray to the 2. Whichever one starts though, the other projects as the sixth man, who should play certainly no fewer than 18 minutes a game.

That leaves just a few remaining minutes for White, Forbes and Walker. Based on Pop’s pattern of behavior throughout his career, the smart money is on White getting the lion’s share of the leftovers here.

Point guard is often referred to as the hardest position to play in the NBA, but White has a year of sitting on the bench, playing in the G League, and learning Pop’s schemes — an advantage Walker doesn’t have.

Despite Walker’s higher draft position and potential, expect him to take the same path White likely will, and Murray did before him: mostly sit for a year, and then come out firing in his sophomore season. Hey, Aaron Rodgers sat for three years behind Brett Favre, and that worked out well enough for him.

So White should get most of the minutes as the fourth guard behind Murray, Mills, and Bellinelli. However, Bryn Forbes was the best 3-point shooter on the San Antonio Spurs last year, and Pop could still use him out there.

The only remaining solution is to try to sneak the undersized Bellinelli and Forbes in for backup minutes at the 3, and keep Gay, and Dante Cunningham mostly as small-ball 4s. A teeny-tiny lineup of something like Mills, Forbes, Bellinelli, Gay, and Aldridge could be a common occurrence in San Antonio this year.

That’s not to say lineups like this one won’t be without problems. Going from a small forward rotation of Leonard, Green and Anderson to DeRozan, Bellinelli, Forbes and maybe Ginobili might be fine on offense. Defensively… let’s try not to think about it.

Still, Pop seems to always cobble together a good defense and a near-50 win team out of nothing, and Leonard hardly played last year, so it’s almost like the Spurs are just swapping out Green for Derozan. Don’t be too worried about them.

For the second year in a row though, Pop might have to get used to going smaller than he’s normally comfortable doing. At this point, he doesn’t have much of a choice.