Can Spurs push playoff streak to record heights? Predictions here
3. Marco Belinelli the odd man out in the postseason rotation
Read between the lines here and you’ll find a few predictions clustered into one.
The main three: a) spoiler alert, the San Antonio Spurs will be present in spring’s postseason for a 23rd straight time, b) Marco Belinelli will not be as present, at least not for half of the game the way he was last year — he averaged 23.0 minutes per game — and c) the mixture of the Spurs backcourt depth and Lonnie Walker IV’s emergence will be the reason why.
All summer long, there’s one word that’s been constant among interviews and questionnaires: defense.
Last year felt like an anomaly, but the Spurs’ 111.2 defensive rating was their worst since 1996-97, which is more crazy when you consider the rules that aided defensive specialists.
Perhaps you don’t take my word on it, perhaps you do. But it comes as no coincidence that 70-year-old Gregg Popovich is running sprints, going out of his way, breaking a sweat to show his players the intricacies of transition defense, a setting the Spurs ranked dead last in at stopping, at 1.19 points per possession a season ago.
All that considered, I don’t think you need a road map to see where I’m going with this.
You can’t spell “defense” without first spelling “Marco Belinelli is not very good at defense.” And if Gregg Popovich can laugh about it, so can you and I, and even Belinelli himself.
It’s always been difficult writing negativity-based takes on players. For the record, Belinelli is extremely likable and remains one of the league’s better shooters within the catch-and-shoot or off-screen settings. But for a player whose expertise is supposed to come on offense, the numbers don’t reflect a player who can’t be replaced.
Only Bryn Forbes was statistically as bad as Belinelli was on defense a season ago and even his offensive rating ranked only 12th on the team.
Without ever stepping foot in a Spurs’ locker room, you can get a feel for how important Belinelli is to the culture. What he does as a leader and teammate feel irreplaceable.
What the 32-year-old journeyman does on-court, though, impressive in its own way as it may be, feels replaceable, especially if we expect the up-and-coming young Spurs to produce as well as we say they do.
To put it into a hypothetical: let’s say it’s April and you’ve been tasked with predicting how these Spurs will fare in the postseason. I’ll list off some names; stop me if you read one that you think Belinelli will be getting minutes over by the end of this regular season.
Dejounte Murray. Derrick White. Bryn Forbes. Lonnie Walker IV. Patty Mills. Even DeMar DeRozan (played about one-fifth of his time last year at shooting guard and could do so in the small-ball lineups).
Conceivably, it’d be difficult to see Belinelli getting minutes over any of those guys after all is said, done and won at the end of the regular season.
Serviceable he remains, though. It’s easy to see Belinelli hitting a few buckets per night, and bringing in instant offense for the second unit. It just feels safer to say his minutes will be on the decline — say, 15 or so per night — for the foreseeable future.