The Spurs haven’t played a meaningful game since, oh, mid-March? Once they locked up the two seed, everyone got the feeling that nothing really mattered until the regular season ended. The players might not have felt that way, but sometimes they sure looked like they felt that way. They’ve certainly looked like nothing mattered for a majority of the last two weeks of the regular season. Sometimes it’s been disconcerting. Other times I’ve been able to convince myself that it’s all part of the master plan. “Trust in Popovich,” I tell everyone who cares to talk to me about the Spurs. “He knows what he’s doing. Just wait until the playoffs start!”

As the Spurs’ first playoff game draws near, let’s hope the San Antonio Nihilist Spurs are ready to pull themselves out of this ugly teen goth phase they’re going through and treat the world to the beautiful game we’ve come to know and love.

To do that, they’re going to need a couple players in particular to, for lack of a better phrase, get their shit together. To make matters worse, both are starters. I suppose you could call these players X factors, but right now they just look like two giant “?” marks.

If the Spurs are going to complete the Race for Seis in 2016, Tony Parker and Danny Green have to find themselves.

(Photo Credit: Edward A. Ornelas /San Antonio Express-News)

(Photo Credit: Edward A. Ornelas /San Antonio Express-News)

The good news? They have as many as seven games to get back into playoff form. Seven games against 13 guys who just signed 10-day contracts with the Memphis Grizzlies. I’d rather drink cyanide than watch seven games of Spurs vs. the bandaged-together-corpse Grizzlies though, so let’s hope it doesn’t take that long.

Tony Parker

Anyway you look at it, Parker had an inspiring start to the season. Because I love Basketball Reference, I’m going to look at it through the eyes of some advanced stats. In October/November, Parker held an eFG of 57%, an offensive rating of 115.5, and a defensive rating of 100. Parker’s defense has been a liability in recent years, but he managed to start the season being average on defense, and making up for it by being really effective on offense. Yes, it’s hard to win without playing good defense, but it’s impossible to win without scoring more points than you give up, and Tony helped the Spurs do just that – very well I might add.

In December, his ratings got even better. At the end of the month, his offensive rating was 117.1 and his defensive rating was 96.27. Parker was helping the team score, and he was also playing an important role in shutting teams down on the defensive end. Thirty three year old Parker was having one of the best seasons of his career. But then, well… here’s a chart that tells the story.

MontheFG%Offensive RatingDefensive Rating
October/November57%115.5100
December53%117.196.27
January40%100.2106.6
February50%105108.45
March37%94.31104.77
April39%88.4110.8

As the season wore on, Parker went back to being less capable on defense, and eventually a sub-par player on offense. Uh oh. And his shooting, while not the focal part of the offense, took a huge dip in March and April. Tony Parker making jumpers is not the key to winning a championship, but at the same time, having Parker miss jumpers is a pretty good indicator that they won’t win a championship.

He needs to be a threat when he has the ball in his hands to free up guys like LaMarcus Aldridge, Kawhi Leonard, and Danny Green – mostly the first two – and get them in position for high-percentage shots. If nobody needs to be scared of Tony Parker with the ball in his hands, nobody needs to be afraid of the Spurs offense. And well, that’s not ideal, considering that San Antonio’s goal is to score more points than the opposition on a nightly basis.

Danny Green

There’s a good chance you noticed that Green was a lot better at basketball last season. I cursed his name a lot during this regular season. I didn’t want to curse his name, but jeez, he sure has made it tough to love him recently. Let’s look at some more numbers and quantify that love loss.

Green makes his money by playing stingy defense and nailing 3-point shots, so that’s what we’re going to look at, starting with shooting. Last season, Green scored 946 points while shooting 42% from behind the arc. He made 191 3-point shots, which is pretty good. (Please ignore the fact that Steph Curry made more than 400 this season – he is not human and it’s pretty unfair to compare him and Danny Green.)

In the 2015-16 season, Green started 79 games and shot 33% from three, scoring just 572 points. That was his fewest since the 2011-12 season, in which he started 38 games and scored 603 points. Unlike Tony Parker, Green didn’t tease us with an auspicious start to the season, he just never found his shot, and that’s a big problem, especially since he’s on the court for more than 26 minutes a game.

But what about defense? Surely he’s still good at that.

In short, yes. I mean, the Spurs as a team were amazing on defense, allowing just 92.9 points per game. To put that in perspective, the average team scored 102.7 points per game. San Antonio just had a knack for putting the clamps on whoever showed up to play them any given night, especially at the AT&T Center.

On his own, Green did his part, finishing the season with a defensive ranking of 99 while notching 79 steals, 64 blocks, and 303 rebounds. He’s still a premier wing defender, but that might be the only reason Green still has a starting job.

As impressive as the 2015-16 season was, it felt like there were very few times the Spurs needed to take themselves off cruise control and show the league how good they actually are. In the playoffs, it’s hard to picture San Antonio having that luxury, regardless of what team is in front of them. And if the starting backcourt can’t figure out how to capture the magic that led them to their fifth NBA championship in 2014, they might be looking at another long summer.