Season 49, Game 48
San Antonio 107, Orlando 92
40-8, 2nd in the West

The Magic kind of kicked our butts.

Orlando is the type of team that can give the Spurs a certain kind of trouble: those young and lively athletes flying around the court can make San Antonio look old and past their prime. Experience always wins out, though. So while the Magic made it more interesting than it should’ve been, the final margin was still pretty much where we expected it to be.

Looking at the box score, you have to wonder how the Spurs won this game. Orlando out-rebounded San Antonio by 9 – 51 to 42. They collected a staggering 19 offensive rebounds, leading to tons of second chance opportunities. (They had 10 second chance points in the first quarter alone, and that’s the quarter the Spurs dominated.) They scored 54 points in the paint – 20 more than the Spurs. With all the offensive boards, they put up 96 shots – 18 more than the Spurs.

The difference? San Antonio made 40 baskets, one more than the Magic. San Antonio connected on 9 3-pointers – 4 more than the Magic. And the Spurs shot 21 free throws (10 more than the Magic), making 18 of them (9 more).

The Spurs shot well and the Magic didn’t, even though they mostly outworked and out-hustled the Spurs for a majority of the game. Really, there were only two good spurts for San Antonio: a 12-0 run in the first 2 minutes of the game and a 9-point outburst in the first 2 1/2 minutes of the 4th quarter. There’s your margin of victory right there.

LaMarcus had his best scoring game as a Spur, putting in 28, keeping the Magic at bay whenever the team needed a basket. Patty Mills was the difference maker off the bench, making up for his recent shooting slump by hitting just about everything he put up, including a pretty ridiculous 4-point play in the 4th as the team was (finally) putting the game away for good. And Kyle Anderson put in really solid minutes off the bench, playing poised when the rest of the team was kind of scrambling, and scoring 7 of those 9 points in the critical 2 1/2 minute stretch at the start of the 4th quarter.

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It was a really odd game overall. Simmons, fresh off a string of impressive performances, had a pretty bad night. He got lost defensively too often, and was driving recklessly on offense, getting trapped at the rim with nowhere to go. Kawhi was fairly unimpressive on both ends of the court. Parker and Manu looked a little better than they did in the Cleveland game, but weren’t part of the lineup that Pop went to for energy and passion. Green seemed to be in Pop’s doghouse early in the second half, but then was pretty critical in the aforementioned energy lineup. McCallum and Butler got key minutes as Pop searched for anything that might work.

Diaw was put into the starting lineup, and it looked like a brilliant move as the offense was humming to start. Boris seemed to be some much needed lubricant to keep the offense oiled and humming, a problem the first unit can often have. But the same result was not replicated in the second half.

While the Magic were held to just 92 points, it didn’t really seem as if the Spurs played great defense, particularly given the rebounding issues. Duncan is certainly important to what this team does, but is he still that important?

This is what makes this stretch of games particularly confusing. After the high of December and early January, is this team in a lull? Is the rest of the league catching up to their performance level? Is Duncan that critical to team that the defense can go from ‘historically great’ to ‘fair to better than average, depending on the night’ with his absence?

I know the Spurs keep winning (mostly), and the point differential is still there. But those two lopsided losses to Cleveland and Golden State are hard to forget, and the product on the court, while getting similar results, just hasn’t looked as sharp for a few weeks now.

I’m interested to see how the team fares against better competition that isn’t Golden State, like Oklahoma City and the Los Angeles Clippers. While the 2-seed is still ours for the taking, I think there is more threat below us in the West than we care to admit right now.

Only the games will tell us.

The Pelicans comes to town Wednesday night. I expect the Spurs to be motivated to avenge an ugly early season loss in New Orleans.

Go Spurs Go.