Another night, another soul-crushing loss. I must plead ignorance because I only watched the last 5 minutes of the game; but I feel like I saw enough in that 5 minutes, which is the same thing we saw in the last 5 minutes of the last game, and the game before that, and many times this season: we can not get defensive stops.
But I saw something else in these 5 minutes as well: our offense is horrid in the end of close games. Gone are the days of superb execution and getting exactly the shot we want. Now it seems as if we’re settling for one on one, driving into multiple defenders, hoping for bail out foul calls from the refs and hoisting up bad shots. (To be fair, Parker looked good in the end game. But that’s it. And only when he really did it all himself, usually in early offense.) Our players are trying to win the games themselves, rather than trusting the team and the system and working to get the perfect shot. It reminds me of the old Lost adage: live together; die alone. Hey, at least I have Lost coming back to me next week since the Spurs seem dead set on ending the season as early as possible and making every moment until then as painful as possible.
Maybe I missed something in the previous 43 minutes that would help explain the game better. Is there a reason we went to an 8-man rotation? Is there a reason that Manu was our PF down the stretch? I’m sure there’s reasonable explanations for these things. But there’s no good explanation for this: in the last 5 minutes, Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker were outplayed by Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah. And it wasn’t even close.
Looking Forward:
Atlanta comes to town Wednesday night. This could get ugly.
