With the Spurs facing the Portland Trail Blazers for the next week or two, I felt it was time to dust off one of my favorite running series, Fraternizing with the Enemy. So I reached out to Dave Deckard, head honcho of the excellent site Blazers Edge, to catch up and prepare for the upcoming series with some good-natured banter and analysis.
J.R.
My friend! It’s been too long, and I take all of the blame. Not because I’m being magnanimous, but because I know it’s all my fault. But how shall I begin? I guess it would be better to ask how we should recommence? After all, it’s been since January of 2021 that we’ve done one of these. Makes me feel a more than a little bit nostalgic. Perhaps the simplest way forward is to dispense with the pleasantries, but I really do enjoy being pleasant. It’s been one of the hallmarks of our 15 years of conversing with each other.
I saw a stat that in three of the four previous times our two teams have met in the playoffs, the winner went on to The Finals. In 1990, your team won and then went down to the Bad Boy Pistons, and in 1999 and 2014, the Spurs went on to win it all after surviving your team. It makes this series feel consequential, or at least less like a first round matchup.
I’ll admit that when I watch Deni Avdija play, I see shades of my favorite player from the Big Three era, Manu Ginobili: a versatile wing with size who can score as well as create, is impossible to keep out of the paint, and who draw fouls as if by magic. I was watching the play-in game against Phoenix and one of the Suns had the misfortune to graze Avdija’s hair with his hand and Deni shivered his body in a way that communicated “serious contact has occurred” in ref-speak at a speed that was practically preternatural. Highly impressive.
So, how do you see Avdija attacking San Antonio?
Dave
Well, well! If it isn’t the Spurs Guy! Long time! How was your day? Did you trip over a curb and fall into a pile of gold doubloons? Are you blowing your nose with the winning Powerball ticket? Did you hire a drunk monkey to smash a computer keyboard only to watch him accidentally hack the Bitcoin blockchain? How IS life as a San Antonio fan?
J.R.
I guess if Wemby is doubloons and Castle is a Powerball ticket then Harper is the blockchain hack. It’s not exactly trading a generational superstar in his prime to L.A. and getting the top pick to draft Flagg, but I could see how it could be frustrating to some outside of San Antonio. How is life as a Portland fan?
Dave
Middling. I mean, making the playoffs is nice, but the team is still directionless and waiting to see the priorities of a new owner we know nothing about. We’re at the point where two wins versus the Spurs would be seen as success. That’s better than trolling the lottery (since nobody walks and balks us to third-and-a-half base courtesy of repeated ping pong ball fortunes) but it’s not a great spot in absolute terms.
So here’s the thing. Say what you want about and during the series. Call San Antonio a better team. That’s obvious. I agree wholeheartedly. But I don’t ever want to hear anything about Spurs Exceptionalism again. We are clearly not facing a 60-win, second seeded team because you made better decisions, hired the right coach, or have some mystical culture. When you weren’t getting high picks you struggled just like everyone else. We are going to get mown under by you because you drafted Wemby and Harper in succession…something I suggested the NBA enact rules against YEARS ago
I don’t mind that you have Wembanyama! Enjoy! But Dylan broke me. Do not expect me to applaud anything that happens to you, including championships, from here on out. This is prefabricated success, right out of a jar. Anything else is watching a huge thunderstorm roll through, then turning on your sprinkler and claiming YOU watered the lawn. And then saying you’re way better gardeners than those desert dwellers.
Don’t worry, in four years everyone will have forgotten this and calling you brilliant AGAIN. But I’m going to Cassandra of Troy this into the ground. You’re literally an example of one of the ways this league is broken. I don’t begrudge you the celebrations you’ll have because of it. I’d celebrate too! But as an onlooker normally and an opponent for the next two weeks, I have very mixed feelings about this whole thing.
That said, Deni Avdija loves to drive the middle with his right hand. He’s quick as anything and has succeeded all season, scoring and drawing fouls, but everybody knows what he does. Do you suppose the over/under on Wemby blocks in this series is one million or two million?
J.R.
I would expect you to have to hunt far and wide to be able to find any reasonable Spurs fans who would argue for the inherent rightness of the San Antonio Way after the team has tanked to the extent they tanked for as long as they tanked. In my mind, the good ship Spurs Exceptionalism has not only sailed, it hit a series of icebergs, plummeted to the bottom of the sea and punched a hole through the crust.
You could make the case, and I know I’ve heard it made pretty convincingly, that up until Leonard forced his way out of town, the Spurs were the one franchise who had done the team building thing the right way all along. The bumper sticker was “Built Not Bought” and I’m pretty sure there are a number of tattoos out there as well. But there’s no argument remaining in that direction now that the team has reloaded the way that they have.
No, there wasn’t anything inspirational about how this Spurs team came together, but that doesn’t mean you won’t hear people getting on their soap boxes to crow about how the team plays. There’s the subject of Ethical Basketball that’s been bandied about and harped upon to call out teams and players who hunt foul calls. So that might end up chafing some people a bit, but I think that kind of thing is more of a spectrum than anything like a binary, black and white kind of deal. Everybody sells contact to some extent. The only question is how much it’s done and whether it’s justified, which is just the kind of subjective topic that exists solely in the eye of the beholder.
As to Wemby’s blocks, I know Portland likes to take a ton of shots around the basket, and I know that the Spurs defense is at its best when Victor can stay in the paint by switching to “guarding” whichever opponent is the closest to lane. So unless the Blazers can develop an extreme tactic that regularly tempts him away from protecting the rim, Wemby will camp out by the basket as much as he can. Whether that means he’s able to get a bunch of blocks is an open question though, because oftentimes he finds it difficult to swat any shots because guys just decide not to test him.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to stretch the Spurs on defense. The postseason is where regular season trends can vanish as fouls become hard to come by. Coaches can bring some serious heat when they see the same team over and over again, and Tiago Splitter lived in the Spurs system long enough to know it inside and out. Where do you see Portland trying to create an advantage against this young San Antonio team?
Dave
Portland will probably shoot a metric ton of threes. That’s in their portfolio already (the attempts, not the makes). Three-pointers are game-benders. The Blazers need these games to be bent because San Antonio wins if they go straight as planned.
Let’s get real. There are no advantages to be created. Everything Portland relies on, the Spurs have a counter for. What the Spurs don’t do well on defense the Blazers aren’t built to take advantage of. There’s literally no edge for Portland. There’s only keep it close, within a couple possessions, and go for the hot ending. The Blazers are usually good at that, unless in the process they have to inbounds the ball in a crucial situation. Then they suck like a giant, rabid squid with a pacifier.
One area of contrast is that the Spurs commit and force few turnovers, the frantic Blazers many. If they can get San Antonio playing messy, that’s to their advantage even if they lose as many TO’s as they force.
Offensive rebounding could be another important battleground stat. The Spurs are very good at it, the Blazers great. Portland can’t let San Antonio take away their offensive boards or even match them rebound for rebound. San Antonio’s great defensive rebounding could be the factor that makes this series easy for them.
What’s your read?
J.R.
If I have a concern, it’s about the lineup Portland hardly used in the regular season because of injuries, but went to at the end of the play-in game in Phoenix: Avdija, Holiday, Sharpe, Grant and Camara. (h/t to Jason Timpf for the heads up.) This lineup is the essence of small sample size theatre because it only logged 96 minutes total during the season, but they absolutely had Phoenix for lunch down the stretch, and they tallied a 149 offensive rating this season.
It’s a stout, smallball unit (with shades of the Warriors Hamptons five) with lots of physicality and tons of defensive range. When San Antonio has the ball, they’d switch everything and try to turn the Spurs into a iso-only attack, which is what the teams that succeed against San Antonio have been able to do. On offense, they’d spread the floor and try to scheme Wemby into guarding someone like Camara above the break to make it difficult for him to recover to the basket to deny drivers.
It might be a longshot, and it would require Portland to keep it close for this unit to me in a position to close the game, but these five on the court together have a shot at doing to the Spurs what they did to the Suns and forcing San Antonio to do what they’d prefer not to have to: make Wemby, Fox or Castle to go 1×1 against excellent defenders in order to secure the win.
We’ll see what it looks like for real on Sunday evening. Can’t wait to watch and then discuss with you afterwards.
