Tag: Tim Duncan

Witherspoon working to salvage an NBA career







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His big night in Houston becoming a blurrier memory by the day, Wesley Witherspoon was back on the practice floor Wednesday, once again spilling sweat at the seemingly impossible task of making the Spurs’ roster.

“Stuff like that lasts until you leave the locker room,” Witherspoon said of Sunday’s breakout preseason performance. “Then it’s back to work.”

The 17 points he scored as the Spurs’ starting small forward against the Rockets aside, Witherspoon remains the longest of long shots still left in camp.

In all likelihood, the undrafted rookie will soon be looking for a new professional home before he ever unpacked at his first one.

This was decidedly not how the script was supposed to go.

At this time two years ago, heading into his junior season at the University of Memphis, Witherspoon was projected as an NBA first-round draft choice, guaranteed money and a guaranteed roster spot there for the taking.

Though not quite in the same talent bracket, Witherspoon was predicted to one day follow in the footsteps of Tyreke Evans, a fellow member of Memphis’ Class of 2008 and a Sacramento lottery pick in 2009.

“I felt like it was the best decision for me to stay,” said Witherspoon, 22. “You can’t listen to all the stuff you hear, about where you’re going to be drafted. I felt like I wasn’t ready to go. So I didn’t leave.”

In retrospect, the decision might have cost the 6-foot-8 forward millions.

His junior season was a disaster almost from the start. Witherspoon played poorly in front of NBA scouts — and a national television audience — in a loss to Kansas in December.

Then came arthroscopic knee surgery.

Six games after he returned, Witherspoon was suspended for mocking an assistant coach on the team bus after a loss to SMU.

By March, Witherspoon was back — but as a reserve. Between injury and suspension, he missed 12 games. His draft stock plunged.

Witherspoon came back as a senior, averaged a respectable 7.2 points and 3.7 rebounds, then was passed over by every team in the NBA draft.

Having never expected to be a four-year college player in the first place, Witherspoon now describes his downfall in Memphis in purely practical terms.

“My time in Memphis was well spent,” Witherspoon said. “It was a great four years. That’s the past. Right now, I’m focused on playing for the San Antonio Spurs.”

Sunday in Houston, Witherspoon was able to flash a bit of that long-ago potential.

Earning the start next to Tim Duncan and Tony Parker in a 117-106 win over the Rockets, Witherspoon knocked down 6 of 9 shots, including a pair of 3-pointers.

He led all players in scoring and showed an impressive burst and explosion in the halfcourt.

“Guys get pretty excited, trying to make a basketball team,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “If you have a bad night, it’s like the end of the world. If you have a good night, you’re feeling pretty good.”

In San Antonio, Witherspoon is tasked with making a roster already more or less set, at a wing position where the Spurs are overstocked.

In a sense, his NBA career is considered day-to-day.

“He probably came back down to Earth a little bit with today’s practice,” Popovich said Wednesday. “We all get back to normal after a while. But he showed he’s got some ability and some potential there.”

For an undrafted rookie trying to make possible the impossible, the highs and lows rarely last long.

His pro career nudged from the fast track and onto a path considerably more treacherous, the longest of long shots aims to make every chance count.

“I came here to get better, and I feel like I’m doing that,” Witherspoon said. “This is a great place to start your career.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net

Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN

Ex-Spurs guard Vaughn gets win over former team














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By Jeff McDonald

ORLANDO, Fla. — Not long before the Spurs tipped off at the Amway Center, the opposing coach wandered into their locker room.

No, Jacque Vaughn was not lost in his new home arena.

“Jock-o!” a smiling Spurs coach Gregg Popovich bellowed.

Vaughn not only joined Popovich in the NBA head coaching ranks after spending three seasons as a player and two as an assistant with the Spurs.

Sunday night, Vaughn also beat him.

Behind 18 points from rookie Andrew Nicholson and 17 from Glen Davis, the Orlando Magic — in their first preseason under their rookie head coach — held on for a 104-100 victory.

Sure, it was just an exhibition. No, it won’t count toward the 847 victories Vaughn still needs to catch Popovich as the NBA’s winningest active coach.

For Vaughn, growing every day into the role of a head coach, the win was still sweet.

The best moment? After the game, when the Spurs — some of them his former players, others his former teammates — lined up on the court to give Vaughn a congratulatory hug.

“That was a special feeling,” said Vaughn, 37, who was named Orlando’s coach last summer when Stan Van Gundy was canned.

“There are guys on that team I played with, guys on the team that I coached, staffs that I was in a lot of meetings with. You think back on what basketball is all about, and for me, that’s it right there.”

Before the game, Popovich praised Vaughn, his latest former player to take the head coaching plunge.

“You can look at players on any team and get a feel for who has an intuitive sense of what’s going on on the court,” Popovich said. “Jacque had that. He was one of those players you would seek out and share information with and get suggestions from.”

For the veteran-laden Spurs, visiting Vaughn was the bright spot in another day in another preseason that some players admit is starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day.

The Oct. 31 opener at New Orleans can’t here soon enough.

“We’ve got a lot of guys who just want to get through the preseason,” Popovich said.

One of those veterans, forward Stephen Jackson, agreed: “Yeah, it’s boring. We’re ready for games that count.”

The Spurs weren’t quite locked in on either end Sunday, giving up nearly 50 percent shooting while hitting only 40.7-percent of their own shots.

Danny Green remained dialed in, hitting 3 of 6 3-pointers en route to 13 points. Tim Duncan offered a solid 12-minute cameo, producing nine points and four rebounds. Manu Ginobili had one of his sharpest outings of the preseason as well, pouring in 12 points on seven shot attempts.

Hoping to work his way into game shape, point guard Tony Parker asked for and received regular-season minutes, playing nearly 32. Parker’s shot was off — he missed 10 of 13 — and he finished with 10 points.

“I think we’re ready,” said Parker, whose team ends the preseason at home against Washington on Friday. “We’ve got another week of practice. Hopefully we can improve and be ready.”

Once the regular season begins, the Spurs and Magic are expected to take divergent paths.

One reason played out Sunday on the other side of the country, when Dwight Howard made his L.A. Lakers’ debut.

Orlando is in the throes of a rebuilding project that could get painful for Vaughn and new general manager Rob Hennigan, another Spurs expatriate.

Popovich is confident if anyone can get the most of the Magic’s young roster, it is “Jock-o.” Sunday, albeit in a game that didn’t count, Vaughn did just that.

“He understands what wins and what loses,” Popovich said. “He understands what a team really is. He’s sort of a no-brainer as far as coaches go.”

jmcdonald@express-news.net
Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN

Pop wants Spurs to remember ‘nasty’ feeling

By Jeff McDonald

Four months later, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is still asking for some nasty.

His players say they are ready and willing to oblige.

“A lot of people still see us as the nice Spurs,” point guard Tony Parker said. “This year, I think we need to play like we’re hungry and we want it.”

It is a question of attitude and a question of identity, which Popovich believes the Spurs surrendered in the final four games of last year’s playoff ejection against Oklahoma City.

That “nasty” Popovich asked for and received during a memorable timeout in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals is what the Spurs aim to channel into a full 82-game slate this season.

“Everybody needs to eat some gunpowder before every game,” said forward Stephen Jackson, who often plays as if he’s ingested an entire arsenal. “We need to be more fired up, a tougher team.”

It would be overkill to suggest tonight’s preseason opener against Italian team Montepaschi Siena at the ATT Center represents the opening salvo of the Spurs’ own personal hunger games.

But it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Siena to practice a duck-and-cover drill beforehand, just to be safe.

Popovich’s intent from the start of training camp — which began with a film-session flashback of last summer’s collapse against the Thunder — has been to nurture a growing chip on the shoulder of his players.

“We have to stop saying, ‘Oh, we won a lot of championships and we’ll come back,’?” Parker said. “We have to play with more attitude — like Pop said, more nasty — all season long.”

Nasty lasted for about two games of last year’s series with OKC, as the Spurs watched their 2-0 lead dissolve into a six-game ouster that propelled the Thunder to the NBA Finals for the first time.

“There was an identity theft that took place in that playoff,” Popovich said. “We played like the Spurs the first couple of games. Oklahoma City, I believe, learned from that and they played like we did offensively, sharing the ball and trusting their teammates, and we lost our identity.

“I want to make sure we understand that and get that back.”

Popovich hopes that nasty attitude will manifest itself most often on the defensive end this season. For the 16th consecutive fall, he opened training camp vowing to improve the Spurs’ mercurial ability to guard people.

As the Spurs have transformed into a more offensive-oriented team in recent years, their defensive standing has declined.

In 2011-12, they ranked second in the NBA by scoring 103.7 points per game. Defensively, they were below the league average in both points allowed (96.5 per game) and field-goal percentage defense (44.8 percent).

“We’ve got to do our best to become a better defensive team,” Popovich said. “That’s easy to say, but it’s more about a consistency that we didn’t have.”

A fair question: How can a team that made limited personnel changes, bringing back 13 players from last year’s squad, expect to make those strides?

“It’s just an all-around team focus on being a defensive ballclub,” power forward Tim Duncan said. “I think the last couple years, our focus has kind of been on offense, trying to up our tempo and be more of a scoring team. We want to keep that, obviously. But defensively, we’re going to have to be better.”

As the Spurs proved for a brief shining moment last June, there’s no problem an attitude adjustment can’t fix.

Their season of nasty begins tonight.

jmcdonald@express-news.net
Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN