Preseason Record: 3-2
The San Antonio Spurs are a franchise that is used to winning games, bringing home five titles across two decades. Their current team has had to come to grips with its inability to keep winning without star talent, and they have finally excised the veterans who helped prop this team up for so long.
Now it’s something of a youth movement, although some of their “young” players are already in their mid-20s. Are Dejounte Murray and Derrick White the backcourt of the future? Can Keldon Johnson take the leap to be this team’s best player? These are the kinds of questions the Spurs have to find an answer to, a far cry from “how do we defend this superstar in the NBA Finals.”
Murray was clearly the team’s best player in preseason, leading the team with 17 points per game and even shooting 40 percent on 3-pointers. The newly signed Doug McDermott his 42.9 percent of his 3-pointers, as expected, while another newcomer in Thaddeus Young settled into a low-usage role as a rebounding and defending big. Do these pieces all fit together? We’re about to find out.
Bold Prediction: This season will bring the most losses of Gregg Popovich’s career. Making the playoffs for so many consecutive seasons means that Gregg Popovich has never truly sustained a losing season; the last two seasons, with 39 losses each, were the first losing seasons in almost 25 years.
The record for most losses in a season for Popovich goes back to his first season on the job in 1995-96, when the Spurs effectively tanked to get Tim Duncan. That team lost 47 games after Pop took over; a season of 34-48 would set the record for the future Hall of Fame coach.