The San Antonio Spurs look like they're suffering from an NBA Finals hangover, because their performance during the preseason wasn't too impressive.
Things got so bad during their 96-87 preseason loss to the Houston Rockets on Friday that head coach Gregg Popovich called not one, not two, but five timeouts all in the third quarter.
“We look very poor,” Pop said. “We look like we're not very interested.”
There could be some reasons for that. As CBS Sports notes, Kawhi Leoanrd, Tiago Splitter and Patty Mills have all been out with injury. Mills, in fact, won't come back until January due to shoulder injury.
Leaving out injuries, performance hasn't been fantastic alone. Manu Ginobili shot 7-of-38 from the field during the preseason!
Power forward Tim Duncan, however, isn't worried.
“We haven't played well, but it's preseason,” Duncan said. “We'll hopefully chalk it up to that. We'll show up for the first game and we'll figure it out, and we'll have 81 after that.”
Duncan probably knows better, since he's been in the league for 18 years now. Matt Bonner agrees, who's been in the league in half the time as Duncan has.
https://twitter.com/Monroe_SA/status/523899955350495232
I'll have to trust the Spurs judgement that it's just the preseason for their performance lately. As they have shown for the past decade, you don't count them out when the postseason comes around.
