San Antonio Spurs: Takeaways from NBA.com’s All-Decade team release

What about the next decade for the Spurs?

Perhaps what excites fans the most is the fact that the San Antonio Spurs have roadmapped a future that will allow them to have multiple players that could contend for an All-Decade Team during the 2020s.

The team’s anchors in 2019-20 — barring some sort of seismic roster change-up — will be LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan.

Behind that, will be tons of depth, particularly in what some say will be the Spurs’ Big Three of the ensuing decade in Dejounte Murray, Derrick White, and Lonnie Walker IV.

As Air Alamo’s Andrew Ites brought out, it’d probably be unwise to expect this upcoming three to reach success to the same level as say, that Duncan-Ginobili-Parker trio, but they’ll have an opportunity to have each of their respective primes connect all that the same time in the next few seasons.

We haven’t been able to say it often: the San Antonio Spurs will have youth on their side in a major way in the future.

Murray, in particular, will have an opportunity to build on his All-Defensive Second Team appearance in 2017-18. The 22-year-old, who became the youngest player to ever make an All-Defensive team, could become one of the premier two-way players in all of basketball.

On the other hand, White (25) and Walker IV (20) will provide the offensive juice, should Murray’s offensive not materialize the way many fans believe it can.

Analytics suggest that during the next decade, each of the players will hit their statistical peaks. In a study done by HoopsHype last season, it pointed to age 26 or 27 being the apex of a player’s career.

Putting that graph into context: Murray will be 27 in the 2023-24 season, Walker in 2025-26, and White in 2021-22.

In 2015, Vice also created a statistical sample that pointed to age 26 being the age that players produce the most wins per 48. Through maturity, they find a way to make everything click, and the results are excellent. As David Berri made note of in that article:

"“Aging was one of those factors, and what we found is that player performance tends to peak around 26. After that, players start to decline: slowly at first, and then precipitously.”"

Around that time, the Spurs will also be banking on 2019 Draft selections Luka Samanic, Keldon Johnson and Quinndary Weatherspoon to be hitting their peaks at that same time.

It seems implausible that any of the other Spurs projects (Jakob Poeltl, Trey Lyles, Chimezie Metu or Drew Eubanks) all of a sudden become All-League type players, but they’ll have enough that as long as a few of these guys reach that level, they could be well- off for the foreseeable future.