Storyline 2: Which of the young guards deserves the most playing time?
Even with Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Danny Green gone, the San Antonio Spurs somehow have too many guards to play. Go figure. Dejounte Murray, DeMar DeRozan, Marco Belinelli and Patty Mills are obviously going to see a lot of playing time.
Yet Bryn Forbes, Derrick White and Lonnie Walker IV should be seeing some playing time too. Something’s got to give.
HoopsHabit has covered this particular topic in a little more depth here, but the gist is that there aren’t many options. One of them is playing small ball, which (spoiler alert) will be covered more in the next slide, but the other is just choosing who to play.
Among the three guards who aren’t locks to play a lot, there’s a tradeoff between potential and current value. Walker has the highest potential of the three, but he’s still raw, and is likely to spend most of the year in the G League.
This could be a breakout season for Derrick White, but he’s not the shooter Bryn Forbes already is. The San Antonio Spurs’ starting lineup’s best 3-point shooter could be Pau Gasol at 35.8 percent, followed by Rudy Gay at 31.4 percent and DeRozan at 31.0 percent. They need shooting.
Let’s take a step back though; this is all assuming they have time to even play a fifth guard.
If we very conservatively budget 30 minutes per game each for Murray and DeRozan, and Patty Mills gets 23 (rounding his average minutes played when he came off the bench last year), we’re already left with only 15 minutes for Marco Belinelli at the 2, and none remaining.
As previously mentioned, though, there is a different way to fix the problem …