The state of the Spurs at mid-season The Spurs have been among the worst teams in the league,

The state of the Spurs at mid-season

The Spurs have been among the worst teams in the league, but may have just turned a corner. Will their improved play lead to more wins?

We just passed the halfway mark of the season. If you could describe the Spurs so far in a word, which would you use?

Marilyn Dubinski: Although things have been better the last couple of weeks, over all the main word to describe this season so far would still be disappointing. I know there have been a lot of growing pains with the team getting used to Victor Wembanyama and vice versa, but to reiterate what Jesus, J.R. and I discussed a while back, I just never imagined the team would get worse before they got better. There’s still plenty of time to turn things around (especially once Wemby’s minutes restrictions are lifted), but the first half of the season probably hasn’t been what anyone envisioned.

Mark Barrington: Is there a word that somehow encapsulates frustration combined with euphoria? I’m so overjoyed about the future of this team, but the feeling is tempered by the almost daily experience of watching them fail to execute basic basketball plays. There’s so much future potential, so few results now. It’s like a baby drooling all over itself and spitting up milk, and you wonder if it’ll ever be able to do anything, and before you know it, that little helpless creature is learning calculus. It’s those years in between that make your hair gray. But we really don’t have to go that far with a metaphor, since several players on the Spurs are literally gawky teenagers who still learning how to play the game.

Jesus Gomez: “Frustrating” probably fits best. The losses are not fun, but they are acceptable and arguably even desirable this year. The bigger issue was the lack of direction and the unnecessary experimentation that deprived the team of an identity. Both the Point Sochan and then the Point Branham experiments seemed unwise and so was running so much of the offense through Zach Collins when he was the starter. Those problems, combined with the understandable inconsistency of a young team, made a lot of games frustrating to watch, especially earlier in the season. Now that Wemby is at center, Jones starts at point guard and everyone seems to be in the position they suit best, it’s more fun to watch the young core learn on the job.

J.R. Wilco: I’m going to go with “long-suffering” — first in its obvious meaning for what this half-season has meant for fans, and for its synonym of “patience” for what I see as the main driver in the organization’s decision-making. The Sochan Experiment showed Pop’s long-suffering approach to Jeremy’s development, and required our long-suffering as we watched the league’s top draft pick get increasingly frustrated while being practically ignored instead of scoring easy baskets. The same can be said for: Wemby’s first 20 games at power forward, Pop not calling plays so the team could “figure it out themselves,” and Tre Jones’ inexplicable (and unexplained) absence from the starting lineup. In all of these things, the team showed patience and the fans suffered long … even if it the experimentation wasn’t even half a season long, and even though a synonym of patience is passivity.

The Spurs won seven of their first 41 games. Will they win more in the second half of the season? What record do you think they’ll have at the end?

Dubinski: I believe they will be better. Wemby has been so good in limited minutes lately and should be able to play normal minutes again soon, which will be a big boost, plus the team has been much better since Gregg Popovich finally decided to start Tre Jones. It will still be an uphill battle on most nights, and the team needs to figure out how to win tight games (they’d lost their last 14 games under that scenario before the win in Washington), but I’d like to think they can still get it together enough to reach 20 wins.

Barrington: The Spurs are a whole lot better than they were at the start of the season, they’ve moved from the realm of unbelievably bad to merely awful. The problem with their win/loss record is that there aren’t a whole lot of worse teams than them in the league. I still think the improvement in play will net them some additional wins, but probably not a lot more. My prediction for total wins is somewhere in the 17-20 win range, barring major injury.