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Spurs undone by critical gaffes

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

PORTLAND, Ore. – The doors swung open to the visiting locker room at the Rose Garden late Friday night, revealing a scene somber even for a wake.

Minutes earlier, the Spurs had just dropped a 98-96 decision at the buzzer, losing again in Portland, this time amid a roll call of fourth-quarter errors so horrifying they would later have to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Side-by-side, players sat at their lockers in pindrop silence. Coach Gregg Popovich, still in coat and tie, paced the room. All wore the same blank expression that asked the same unanswerable question: What had just happened?

On a laptop in one corner rolled video of Portland’s final, fateful play – a tie-breaking lob from Andre Miller to Nicolas Batum that beat the horn and set off Mardi Gras in bleachers. Four morbidly curious Spurs gathered around grimly, medical examiners performing their own autopsy.

Batum scored four points in the final 0.9 seconds, lifting the Trail Blazers from certain defeat, to probable overtime, to stunning victory, all without leaving time to breathe.

“It was ridiculous,” a subdued Manu Ginobili said. “One of the craziest games I’ve lost in the NBA.”

The Spurs still led 96-90 with 1:22 to go, when Ginobili drilled his fourth 3-pointer. Their Rose Garden demons, which had conjured up five straight losses in Portland, seemed on the edge of banishment.

And then, Miller scooted for a layup.

96-92.

And then, Miller took the ball from Tony Parker, his career-high eighth turnover, and made another basket with 30.2 ticks left.

96-94.

And then, Ginobili dribbled the ball off Wesley Matthews’ leg, sparking a frantic fast break that resulted in two Batum foul shots with 0.9 left.

And then, Batum – who still has not missed a free throw in March – hit both.

96-96.

And then, Steve Novak, inserted to inbound on the Spurs’ final play, with OT seeming like the worst-case scenario, threw high for Ginobili streaking to the basket. The ball went out of bounds untouched.

“I just couldn’t reach it,” said Ginobili, who had 10 of his 21 points in the fourth.

And then, with the Blazers afforded their own chance at a miracle, Miller hit Batum with a perfectly placed backdoor lob, which the latter dropped in over Parker – one Frenchman outleaping another.

And then, the final horn sounded, and the crowd exploded and the Spurs were left to make sense out of what had just occurred.

In one sense, the answer was easy. Just another end-game miscue.

“We knew they were going to the rim,” Popovich said. “We were switching it, and we did a poor job switching it.”

Miller, third among the NBA’s active leaders in assists with 6,976, had no trouble ranking his latest one.

“That was No. 1,” said Miller, who matched Batum with 21 points.

For the second game in a row, the Spurs wasted an opportunity to win with Tim Duncan and his sprained left ankle back in San Antonio. Just as in Denver two nights earlier, the Spurs came unraveled in the fourth.

Later, in the locker room, while his teammates still wondered what went wrong on the Batum tap, Ginobili still fumed about the turnovers that came all before.

“Three in 40 seconds,” he said. “Unacceptable.”

For the Blazers, it was eight points in the final 72 seconds. And another victory over the Spurs. The Spurs (57-15) have lost six of seven to the Blazers (42-30). But none like this.

It gave the Spurs their second two-game losing streak of the season, and their first since losing at New York and Boston on Jan. 4 and 5. But that was of little consolation.

Afterward, Ginobili compared Friday’s debacle to the 2005 loss to Houston, when Tracy McGrady scored 13 points in 35 seconds. Parker recalled Derek Fisher’s 0.4-shot to send the Lakers over the Spurs in Game 5 of the 2004 Western Conference finals.

“Nothing was worse than that,” Parker said.

Judging from the befuddled looks around him, that felt hard to believe. Even as he spoke the words, Parker stared at the ground, rubbing his temples like a man with a migraine.

This is the kind of loss that sticks with a team, even though it shouldn’t. There is another game Sunday in Memphis, against another tough team on the road.

“We just have to move on,” Parker said.

Spurs’ March defensive collapse has been striking

Late after the Spurs’ loss against Boston early Friday morning, an interesting comment emanated from the Turner Studios in Atlanta as their commentators tried to explain San Antonio’s striking recent defense collapse.

Back when the Spurs were winning championships, the team’s defense improved as the season progressed. It always was one of the team’s biggest strengths when the playoffs started.

Rick Fox knows all about those Spurs teams. He had the difficult chore of trying to score against them during his own career with the Los Angeles Lakers.

But Fox had an interesting explanation why the Spurs have struggled defensively this season.

“It’s because Tim isn’t 32 any more,” Fox said, referring to  Tim Duncan, who will be turning 35 on April 25.

Duncan clearly isn’t the defensive force he once was. But the Spurs no longer have the defensive weapons surrounding him like Fabricio Oberto, Francisco Elson and Bruce Bowen.  The halcyon years when he teamed up with David Robinson in “The Twin Towers” has never seemed farther away.

Another reason is that the Spurs are relying more on jump shots than any previous time in Popovich’s coaching tenure. The offense looks unbeatable when the shots are dropping. But their transition defense after misses has provided maddening breakdowns throughout the season.

Both Boston coach Doc Rivers and Gregg Popovich said that the Spurs’ defense has been challenged as the team has evolved into a perimeter-oriented team.

Popovich said the heavy reliance on 3-pointers in the second half of their 107-97 loss to Boston helped explained the defense.

“The game was won when we got a little three happy in the third quarter.  Then, the transition defense didn’t follow,” Popovich said. “Some of the shots were very good and open, some were contested.  The transition after it is really important and they took advantage of it.  They made it a 10-point game at that point, we couldn’t get back in it and that was the game.”

When jumpers are falling, the team looks strong. But when they aren’t, the defense has struggled unlike any previous Spurs team in the Duncan era.

Boston hit 54.8 percent from the field Thursday night. It marked the third straight game and sixth time in the last nine games that an opponent has hit at least 50 percent from the field against the Spurs. And no opponent has hit less than 45 percent against them since their March 2 victory at Cleveland — a stretch of 14 games.

It also was the fourth time in five games that opponents have scored at least 100 points. It marked the ninth time during March the Spurs allowed at least 100 points. In every other game but one, they allowed 95 points. In that game, San Antonio permitted 91.

“I think those (stats) are overrated a little bit because the pace of their shot is quicker now, too,” Rivers said. “When you shoot quicker because you’re scoring more points, then even a good defense is going to give up more point. Even on their good defensive nights, because they’re scoring, that means you get the ball back quicker as well which means you get more possessions. That’s probably the biggest difference.”

In a way, the Spurs of 2011 are a little reminiscent of the Phoenix Suns of the “Seven Seconds to Shoot” era  with Mike D’Antoni in the late 2000s. When their shots were falling, that Phoenix team looked like it was in championship caliber. But when they didn’t fall, they never advanced past the Western Conference finals.

The Spurs have just struggled through their worst defensive month in the Duncan era. It coming at the wrong time of the season with the playoffs approaching.

Spurs Nation has never seen a team in the Duncan era looking for a defensive identity so late in the season.

And if that defense doesn’t improve quickly, the Spurs’ post-season plans look like they will be short this season.

Here’s a look at some year-to-year March defensive statistics during the Duncan era.

Year                    Def. FG pct.          PPG        Record       Margin of victory

1998                        40.4                    84.8         11-5                      5.8

1999                        40.5                    84.3         14-2                   12.5

2000                       44.4                    91.3         10-5                     6.2

2001                        40.8                   85.8         14-3                   11.9

2002                        42.3                   87.4         13-3                     9.0

2003                        45.3                  93.9          14-3                    7.2

2004                        43.4                   87.4         11-5                     8.7

2005                        43.1                   88.5         10-5                    6.1

2006                        45.2                   90.9         12-4                     7.4

2007                        43.3                   84.8         13-2                   12.7

2008                        43.7                  90.9          12-6                     4.3

2009                       45.0                   91.1           9-8                     3.6

2010                       44,1                    94.3         12-5                     7.9

2011                       48.7                 1o2.6            8-8                     0.0

Note: The statistics are for Spurs opponents during the  month of March. Def. FG pct. represents defensive field-goal percentage. PPG are the points allowed by the Spurs in March games. Record indicates their March won-loss record.  And margin is San Antonio’s average margin of victory during March games.

Spurs demolish Kings; clinch top seed

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

Showered and dressed and dispensed with his media duties in the wake of the Spurs’ 124-92 victory over Sacramento on Wednesday, Manu Ginobili was in a hurry to get home.

The L.A. Lakers and Golden State were already in the first quarter of a nationally televised game that had immediate implications on the Spurs’ playoff seeding.

Ginobili, however, had other viewing plans. Like the insides of his eyelids.

“I’ll probably just go to sleep,” he said.

What Ginobili might have missed, while catching his Zs, was the Spurs’ dream scenario come to fruition. Thanks to the Lakers’ 95-87 loss in Oakland hours later, the Spurs clinched the Western Conference’s No. 1 seed for the first time since 2005-06.

All along, coach Gregg Popovich has been blasé about the importance the conference’s top spot, a half-hearted “nobody would turn it down” being his most enthusiastic endorsement.

Popovich’s laissez faire philosophy was evident in Ginobili’s postgame itinerary. It was not reflected in the hair-on-fire effort with which the Spurs approached their end of the bargain Wednesday night at the ATT Center against the Kings.

Behind 25 points from Ginobili, 19 off the bench from George Hill and a pinball-tilting third quarter that tested the limits of the club’s offensive record books, the Spurs pulled onto the doorstep of the No. 1 seed that never was their obsession to begin with.

“We’ve had it and won and had it and lost,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “The best team usually ends up winning.”

Under Popovich, the Spurs have owned the No. 1 seed four other times, parlaying it into championships in 1999 and 2003. In 2005, they won with a two seed. In 2007, they did it from the third slot.

“We knew it wasn’t the end of the world to finish second,” Ginobili said, even before the seeding was official. “At the same time, after the kind of season we had, we wanted it.”

It has been quite a turnabout from five days earlier, when the Spurs were on a six-game losing streak and in danger of fumbling the No. 1 seed within sight of the finish line.

With Wednesday’s win, the Spurs improved to 60-19, ensuring the fourth 60-win season in franchise history and the first since the 2005-06 team won a franchise-record 63 games.

“We knew we were not going to lose every single game for the remainder of the season,” Ginobili said, although at times it seemed that way.

Now, the Spurs have the option of downshifting over the final three games of the season, though they remain in a pitched battle with Chicago for the NBA’s top overall record.

Wednesday, with seeding still up for grabs, there was no let-up.

The Spurs scored a season-high 41 points in the third quarter, on 14 of 17 shooting, to transform a 51-49 lead at half into their most lopsided win of the season.

“Our thing was if we could get rebounds and push it, it would open the game up,” said Hill, who had 12 points in the third. “And that’s what happened.”

The victory the 796th of Popovich’s career, moving him past Hall of Famer Red Auerbach for the second-most with one team in NBA history.

Popovich’s favorite moment came late in the fourth quarter, with the game long since decided. DeJuan Blair jumped a pass from Tyreke Evans, knocking the ball toward the sideline.

With the ball rolling out of bounds, Blair hit the ground, beating Jason Thompson to it and slapping it ahead to Danny Green to ignite a fast-break layup.

As Blair came back down the court, Popovich leapt up and down and pumped his fist in approval.

“Coaches love that sort of thing,” Popovich said. “That kind of effort is above and beyond.”

Above and beyond, the Spurs have locked down the top seed they swear – perhaps a little too vehemently – never mattered all that much in the first place.

But, no, they’re not going to turn it down.