Shooting coach (Google says Jimmy Baron) and player development coaches (making the decision to credit Rashard Lewis here because Sonics forever) can take a bow. Castle and Harper and even Wemby have made incredible strides thruout the year. All of their decision-making, especially shot diet, have become soooooo much better from the first half of the season to now.

Right Wemby isn’t carrying. The squad is loaded as we saw last night

I literally had someone tell me the this week that Spurs would be a lottery team w/o Wemby.

By far the deepest team other than OKC. What, 8 guys averaging double figures? Spurs are loaded.

fr these dudes are def stepping up, gotta recognize the whole squad making Wemby shine

Even without Wemby for 16 games so far this year the Spurs are on a 56 game win pace. That would still put them in second place in the Western Conference. (And that stretch includes multiple wins against other playoff teams.)

Unrelated comment i dont like your username :(

That’s exactly what it takes to win a championship. Star player and everyone else playing and excelling in their role throughout the organization

Fox, Castle, and Harper get a lot of attention, but Vassell is having a hugely underrated season too. Especially since after last season there was a lot of talk about whether he was worth the contract and whether he had a future on this team at all.

When they beat OKC in those 2 games in 3 days - Wemby was good but castle and Fox beat our ass.

Remove Wemby and they’re just another Wizards without Sarr, AD and Trae

Really hope the Nuggets or somebody can get lucky and knock them out of the playoffs before we have to face them. They’re looking really scary.

Harper and Castle both shooting over 40% from 3 since Feb. 1 makes them real tough to guard

The rest of the league is going to be in serious trouble for a long time if these 2 have legit found their shot. We were already 2nd in the west with them both shooting like complete ass from 3 to start the season. 2 months isn’t a huge sample size, but it’s fairly significant.

Those numbers likely drop a lot in the playoffs, but as long as they continue playing the way they’ve been playing overall they have a shot against anyone

What teams are those cuz that’s definitely not true

I feel bad for spurs fans, they had a whole 5 year stretch between their generational dynasties.

any team with length + shooting, we get fucked. we’re not super tall (besides alien), so we give up every rebound

our guards also can’t slash the way they usually do

Yeah, ideal opponent if we make the Finals would be Detroit. Both the Celts and Knicks give us fits.

The Knicks can kick our ass too

I agree. But a lot of this will come down to how Mitch schemes.

For the most part, using Castle as a POA defender and having Wemby lock down the paint, is an excellent defense. But the Celtics 5 out offense makes this hard.

I think Mitch has done an amazing job with development, but some of his in game adjustments have been head scratchers. So I’m interested in seeing how he does in the playoffs. This will be a learning experience for him to.

It’s honestly been pretty nice having the playoffs be so great the last several years without a dog in the race. Just great basketball.

Like I’m stoked to watch the Spurs of course. But I’m considerably older and have way more responsibilities that could be affected by increased blood pressure and post-loss mood drop. Lol

Us southerners are eatin good this season for sure. OKC and San Antonio dominating, Mavs and Rockets are at least hilariously entertaining at times.

i think so too

Castle is truly a menace. He has all the normally calm guards acting out of pocket with his defense. SGA who never says shit has been chirping with Castle since his rookie year.

Wemb/Harp/Fox/Castle have an avg age of about 23. What is this team going to be like next season? Yeesh.

For me it’s not even the insane level of play we’ve been at, it’s that the guys on the squad genuinely seem to want to play together for the next 5+ years. Maybe that’ll change but it definitely seems like they’re becoming brothers and learning to dominate together.

The quality of posts on this sub and the general NBA discourse has diminished so far with all of the cherry picked stats. So sick of reading the “first player to score 10+ points while grabbing 13 boards, dishing 6 assists, and blocking 4 shots” stats. If you didn’t care about these arbitrary cutoffs before, why do we now?

 

Bam’s 83 point game is the only one that was eventful this year.

 

Even Shai’s 20+ points in a game is weird and arbitrary. 30 point games in a row would be interesting, or something that guys cannot sleepwalk into. And it’s so much worse when players start buying into this stuff, as we saw Shai playing garbage time this year to secure his 20. Trae used to do the same thing to preserve his “games with 5+ assists” in a row stat. If the bar for the stat is completely unimpressive, I’m not impressed with the stat.

For this particular post, 29 games is just a weird ass cutoff. Here’s the teams that have outright BEST stretch of X games:

• 12: OKC 12-0
• 13: OKC 13-0
• 14: OKC 14-0
• 15: OKC 15-0
• 16: OKC 16-0
• 17: n/a
• 18: OKC 17-1
• 19: OKC 18-1
• 20: OKC 19-1
• 21: OKC 20-1
• 22: OKC 21-1
• 23: OKC 22-1
• 24: OKC 23-1
• 25: OKC 24-1
• 26: n/a
• 27: n/a
• 28: SA 26-2
• 29: SA 27-2

Or, you know, we can just look at the total season record for a team to see how good they are… which gets rid of any variance for streaky scheduling versus crappy opponents, or tough stretches of b2bs, etc. Widely available stat databases where people can systematically search for cherry picked stuff has really ruined sports discourse. I’ll die on this hill!

First player I’ve seen where it’s like “yeah lock him in as MVP for the next 5 seasons”… And the team around him is pretty good, too, with room to add talent to fill some gaps.

LeBron was certainly that way. I think the “casual eye test” is kind of a thing, my then-gf at the time watched rookie LeBron play and said, “That guy is so much more athletic than anyone else on the court”. I said something to the effect of “That’s LeBron James, he just graduated high school and you’re going to know his name.”

You knew Bron was for real. Wemby has that exact same vibe, where if he is on, there isn’t a lot of options for the other team to slow him down.

Just once can we get one of these situations to happen and stay in the eastern goddamn conference please

the only thing more annoying about the fact that we didn’t get wemby is the fact that someone else in our division did so now we gotta stare down the barrel of THAT fucking gun 4 times a year for the foreseeable future, cause there’s a 0% chance wemby ever leaves that org and a 0% chance they ever move him