Tag: Gregg Popovich

Few practices in busy Spurs schedule

By Mike Monroe
mikemonroe@express-news.net

The Spurs will spend part of the first day of the new year in the air and the first night of 2012 on the road.

Aside from the Lakers, who played three games in the first three days of the lockout-delayed season, the Spurs have one of the busier early schedules. Tonight’s game at the ATT Center against the Jazz will be their fourth game in six nights. By the time they conclude their second set of back-to-back games — Golden State on Jan. 4 and Dallas on Jan. 5 — they will have played seven in 11 days, with six of those crammed into eight days.

With four travel days included among the 11 days, there is little likelihood they will have a single practice before Jan. 6, an off day between home games against the Mavericks and Nuggets.

Lack of opportunity is but one of the reasons the quality of play this season will suffer from the diminished practice. Because the Spurs have only 13 players on their roster, rather than the 15 they have carried each of the past three seasons, full five-on-five work in practices likely will be curtailed.

“Everybody’s got fewer bodies for a variety of reasons,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “It gives one a little bit of concern, injury-wise, but it’s going to be difficult to have very many really good practices during the season. The bodies that all of us used to have maybe aren’t quite as important in that regard, anyway. It’s going to be tough to do.”

If there is no opportunity for a full practice soon, Popovich said he will ask some of the young players to come to the team’s practice facility so shooting guard Gary Neal can get some full-contact work to prepare him for a return to action, likely next week.

Meanwhile, James Anderson is trying hard to shrug off the fact he won’t get to watch the Fiesta Bowl on Monday night, when the Spurs will be playing the Timberwolves at Target Center in Minneapolis.

“It should be a great bowl game,” said Anderson, who played at Oklahoma State. “I’ll just have to Tivo it.”

Career first: DeJuan Blair’s 22 points against the Rockets gave the third-year big man from Pittsburgh consecutive games with 20 or more points for the first time in his career, but not his best two-game total.

Blair last season scored 18 in a Feb. 8 road win over the Pistons and followed with 28 points in a road victory in Toronto the next night.

At 22, Blair is the youngest of the Spurs’ starters, so it’s no surprise he logged more court time than the rest of the starters on Thursday night, nearly 29 minutes.

Popovich’s decision to rest his older players in the second half of what would turn out to be a blowout loss didn’t surprise him.

“That’s how it’s going to go the whole season,” Blair said. “The whole season is going to hit us right on the head, really fast. So we’ve got to use every chance to be ready for it.”

Spurs drill Mavs in 3-point no-contest

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

The first sign something had gone awry came when Matt Bonner — not typically a point guard nor a ball-handler — dribbled away about 12 seconds of the shot clock before finding himself trapped between a pair of 7-footers in Dallas blue.

Bailed out by a timeout with 4.8 seconds left on the shot clock, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich drew up a play that almost certainly didn’t include Richard Jefferson milking about 4.4 of those seconds before hot-potatoing the ball to backup point guard T.J. Ford about 5 feet behind the 3-point stripe.

After his Hail Mary found the bottom of the net, one of 11 3-pointers the Spurs would make in the first half of Thursday’s 93-71 rout of the defending NBA champion Mavericks, Ford offered the only reaction that seemed appropriate.

He shrugged.

“I didn’t give a you-know-what,” Ford said. “I just threw it up there, and it went in.”

That was the first half in a nutshell for the Spurs, who used a red-hot opening to their first 5-0 start at the ATT Center since 2007-08.

Gary Neal earned his second career start in place of injured All-Star guard Manu Ginobili and set the tone early, burying a pair of 3-pointers in the game’s first 89 seconds.

By halftime, the Spurs had hit 11 of 18 from beyond the arc, equaling both the number of total field goals Dallas had made and turnovers the Mavs had committed.

At that point, the Spurs had outscored the Mavs from 3-point range by a startling margin of 33-0. Bonner had outscored Dallas’ starting five 11-8. Not surprisingly, the Spurs led convincingly at half, 55-29.

“It’s always like that,” said Bonner, who made five 3-pointers en route to 17 points, out? scoring Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki combined. “Misses are contagious, and makes are contagious.”

In the second half, an epidemic case of clank-itis broke out at the ATT Center.

With Dallas (3-5) playing its fourth game in five nights, and the Spurs (5-2) playing their third in four, the final two quarters were played on fumes. The third quarter, in which the teams combined to miss 33 of 41 shots, was lockout ball at its not-so-finest.

The Spurs scored just 11 points in the frame, yet saw their halftime lead of 26 shaved by just two points heading into the fourth.

“Neither team was very sharp,” said Popovich, whose team finished 16 of 33 from 3-point range. “We’re thrilled to have the win. We’re not going to give it away.”

Nowitzki, who came in averaging better than 22 points, struggled through a 3-for-11 night on his way to six points. For the reigning Finals MVP, it was the worst scoring night since Dec. 18, 2009 when he notched six points in 10 minutes in a loss to Houston, a game Nowitzki left early after a collision with the Rockets’ Carl Landry.

“You didn’t see the real Dirk tonight, that’s for sure,” Popovich said.

The list of Spurs who outscored Nowitzki included Jefferson (16 points, seven rebounds), Neal (12 points), Tony Parker (11 points, eight assists), Danny Green (eight) and Ford (seven).

Dallas coach Rick Carlisle refused to let the rugged schedule take all the blame for the dinosaur egg the Mavs laid.

“San Antonio’s energy was better to start the game,” said Carlisle, whose team made just 1 of 19 3-pointers. “We struggled, but their competitive level was higher and that was the difference in the game.”

And sometimes, as Ford proved with a prayer and a shrug early in the second quarter, the difference is in catching a team on the right night.

Ford’s clock-beating bomb, which inflated a 14-point lead to 17, was his only field goal until the fourth quarter.

“That was nothing that you can practice,” Ford said. “Just great timing.”

In a lockout-compressed season like this one, sometimes timing is everything.

Popovich decides to cut losses against Rockets

By Mike Monroe
mikemonroe@express-news.net

HOUSTON — Two minutes into the second quarter of the Spurs’ first loss of the young season, Matt Bonner drilled a 3-pointer that capped a 13-2 run to tie things up with the Houston Rockets at 23-23.

It would be more than 30 minutes and eight straight misses before the Spurs would hit another from long range, and by then it did nothing but make a huge deficit slightly less embarrassing.

The Spurs came in with convincing victories over the Grizzlies — the team that ran them out of the playoffs last spring — and the Clippers, the biggest winners in post-lockout free agency. But Thursday, they were awful in a 105-85 loss that enabled the Rockets to celebrate their home opener in front of an announced sellout crowd of 18,267 at Toyota Center.

Houston was as sharp as the Spurs had been in their Wednesday night home victory over Los Angeles, making 50.6 percent of its shots. Rockets guard Kevin Martin scored 25 in the first three quarters and wasn’t even needed in the final period after Spurs coach Gregg Popovich elected to treat the second half like a preseason game.

In a post-lockout campaign that includes serial sets of back-to-back games and a few sets of three games in three nights, there will be plenty of peculiarities based on the reality of a brutal schedule.

On Thursday there was this: Spurs captain and future Hall of Famer Tim Duncan, willing and able to play, sitting the entire second half as his coach made a judgment based on the quirkiness of a 66-game schedule compressed into 120 days.

Popovich had a perfectly understandable explanation for limiting Duncan to just over 15 minutes of playing time and holding Manu Ginobili, who played only the halfway through the third period, to under 20 minutes.

The rationale came in bullet points:

“Down 18.”

“Third game in four nights.”

“On the road.”

“We weren’t playing well.”

Duncan exited the Spurs locker room without answering questions.

The ultra-competitive Ginobili wasn’t entirely pleased with throwing in the towel early, but understood the reasoning.

“(The Rockets) played a terrific game,” he said, “and after a back-to-back Pop never wants to risk going with everything to make our comeback because it gets dangerous and they just killed us.”

Ginobili predicted there will be more nights when Popovich holds Duncan, now 35, out of big chunks of games, perhaps holding him out of a few contests in their entirety.

“In a season like this one, I’m not going to say you’ll see it very often, but kind of often,” he said. “It’s really hard to send everybody to make a huge effort that you’re not sure is going to pay back. Then we have the (game on) Saturday, Jan. 2 and back-to-back (on Jan. 4-5).

“You have to be smart and just let it go and think about the next one.”

Popovich started thinking about Saturday’s game at the ATT Center against the Utah Jazz after the Rockets blitzed the Spurs in the final 4??1/2 minutes of the first half. With Martin leading the way by scoring 15 of his 25 in the game’s decisive stretch, the Rockets took a 34-31 advantage to 58-35 before the Spurs finished with a mini-flurry of their own and cut the lead to 18 at halftime.

“I’m not sure how many times I want to be down 18 in this shortened season and work Timmy, Manu and Tony (Parker) to work us out of that hole,” Popovich said. “Not this early in the season.

“Later on, depending on our situation, it might make more sense. But at this point, it was a great opportunity to treat it like training camp and get a lot of the younger kids out there and treat it like practice.”