Forty-seven games in, the San Antonio Spurs find themselves on the outside looking in at the playoffs, a revelation very few would have predicted. How far off have we been so far in predicting the fate of the 2019-20 Spurs?
They always say: All it takes is a little bit of alcohol to free a person of their inhibitions and common sense. For basketball fans — and those of the San Antonio Spurs like myself — perhaps all it took was a few months without the game.
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Summer came along and we stewed, watching as computer models and presumably too-analytical-for-their-own-good experts pegged San Antonio as a playoff borderline club, a team whose building blocks weren’t brawny enough to bridge the gaps between two eras of dominance.
The time we spent warning naysayers about the ensuing breakthrough of Lonnie Walker IV, not knowing that he would only eclipse 20 minutes in back-to-back games just twice during the first half of the season.
The time we spent telling every ear that would listen about how the Spurs’ draft triumvirate would come in and make an issue an immediate bang to the league, not knowing that two of them haven’t even played a commercial break’s worth of time (Basketball Reference is just as unsure as the rest of us; they’ve still got Quinndary Weatherspoon’s NCAA statistics on his NBA page).
And yet, within the comfort of two All-Star mainstays and a man far-and-away believed to be the premier coach in the Association, the Spurs are merely on the bubble, currently outside the top eight in the West, but still within striking distance.
The season isn’t lost by any stretch of the imagination. But for the overzealous projections we (yes, “we”) made this past offseason, few aspects of predicting are as fun as looking back at how close (or un-close) we came at the halfway mark.
As a note, we made eight predictions over the summer that we can track (No. 9 was that the Spurs would win a series for the first time since 2017. Let’s not talk about that right now). For that reason, we will cover this in two sections.
So, In the spirit of the late Kobe Bryant, let us take a look back at all the overconfident shots I took at predictions that probably only I believed in, and see how many we hit on.