SAN ANTONIO — After the Spurs lost their ninth game in a row on Monday night, I left the arena feeling particularly bummed out and wondering why.
They had lost the previous eight, but none of those got to me this way. They were frustrating, sure, but they didn't make me sad. I'm a journalist, and one who likes to think he's realistic and sees the big picture when it comes to this team. Just that morning I'd finished a story about how this young group still has a lot to figure out and it's not gonna happen overnight.
So why was I now in a mood that one of my buddies in the media room described as "morose"?
I've been through enough real-life stuff that no basketball game should be able to genuinely make me feel bad, and yet this one did.
Why?
That's the question I asked myself as I settled in for the drive home, radio off so I could make sense of thoughts bouncing around an empty car.
I started small. It was a bummer that the Spurs lost again, and that they lost by a lot of points again. It was frustrating how out of sync they looked for stretches of the game. Not being on the same page is one thing, but there were times it felt like the guys on the floor were reading entirely different books.
Cedi Osman and Charles Bassey had fun and impactful performances off the bench, and Keldon Johnson turned it on late. But it was too little, too late.
I felt for Jeremy Sochan, who defended the All-Star trio of Kawhi Leonard, James Harden and Paul George, all the while submitting a rough offensive performance that will only amplify the rather noxious discourse around Coach Pop trying to turn him into a point guard. It's a shame, because he's a good kid and a fun player, and it's cool to see him be vulnerable and confident enough to embrace this challenge knowing it would be ugly at times.
It was tough to watch Wemby force up jumpers in between his teammates missing him when he did manage to get good positioning near the hoop. When he's on, he's fantastic. But when he's off, he's settling and/or floating around.
As much as I understand Pop letting him find his own spots and do his own thing, it sure looks like he could use some more direction.
All of those developments are real, but while they're not good, they're not new either. They're hallmarks of the losing streak that's now lasted almost three weeks.
I thought about the way that arena felt during the 22-win campaign last year, and how different it felt on opening night just over a month ago—how the energy and mood in the late stages of Monday's loss was a lot closer to the former than the latter.
I thought about Norma, an usher I was talking to before the game, who looked around at the people packing in early to watch the 7 foot, 4 inch phenom warm up. "It's crazy what a difference one guy can make," she said.
My thoughts turned to the individual fans, each of them passionate about this team in their own special way, each of them somewhere between a little disappointed and outright furious about how this game and recent ones have gone. Some were at all 41 games in this building last year, and some are back for the first time in a long time. Some had never seen a Spurs game until today.
The main difference between last year and this year is that last year the Spurs were expected to lose enough games to get a 14% chance at drafting Victor Wembanyama. This year, they have Victor Wembanyama.
It's easier to dance in the rain when you're expecting it to last a while, but once you see sun in the forecast and start thinking about a picnic you want the clouds to go away. After a 3-2 start to the season, including a pair of victories in Phoenix, winning play somehow almost became expected.
That only lasted another 37 minutes or so. Since then the Spurs have:
- Blown a 22-point lead to the Raptors and lost in OT.
- Gotten throttled by the Pacers 152-111 the next night.
- Gone cold in a blowout loss at MSG.
- Lost the third quarter by a lot to an awesome-looking Timberwolves in a 117-110 game.
- Blown a 19-point lead against Duncan Robinson and the Heat.
- Gotten outscored 65-39 in the second half in OKC.
- Blown an 18-point lead against a good Kings team.
- Blown a 19-point lead to the 3-9 Grizzlies.
- Lost bit by bit to a Clippers team that might be figuring out how to put their four future Hall of Fame players together.
Gregg Popovich has come under fire during this streak for his point guard experiment, his rotation and game-planning decisions, to go along with the overall poor performance of this team. His comments after this one resulted in some of the loudest calls for him to step aside that I have ever seen in my eight plus years covering the team.
“I’m totally pleased with the game," he said. "Nobody likes to lose, but I thought their competitiveness and their execution were good against a very good, very talented and very well-coached team. So I’ll sleep well and look at the film we’ll continue tomorrow, but I like a lot of things that I saw. Individually and team-wise.”
Pop absolutely cares and is coaching his guys hard, in his own way, in accordance with the team's long-term plan. But these comments rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way.
Nobody wants to hear that after the team lost their ninth in a row, and by 25 points, and in a game where even a fairly optimistic person could struggle to find the silver lining. I had to think about it a lot before I saw it.
In each of the previous losses, this young group went through something that I have started calling the Dirty Diaper Stretch. It's like when a baby is all happy and cute until, suddenly and without warning, they fill their pants with a smelly mess and start crying. It lasts several minutes that feel like forever and can ruin an otherwise enjoyable evening.
That didn't quite happen in Monday's game. Sure, there were parts where the Clippers put it on them a few possessions in a row, but at no point did that become a 5-24 minute stretch you can point to and say, "that's where it all went wrong."
San Antonio generated some quality shots despite the offense looking dysfunctional, and they gave it their best against a Clippers team that can compete for a championship this year despite their early struggles after adding Harden. The progress is there, if you squint to see it.
"Today, we stayed together. We don’t hang our heads when they made runs. We stayed together, keep helping each other out, communicate and we just tried to correct the little things. That’s an amazing team we played tonight," Keldon Johnson said. "Throughout the game, they made some runs, we made some runs. We've just got to, like I said, always go back to film, look at the things that we can control and try to fix those to the best of our ability.”
Learning and losing is difficult for this young group that did so much learning and losing last year, and for their coach who, fresh off his Hall of Fame induction, said that winning would be as important this year as learning has been in the past, and for the 20-year-old power forward learning to play the point against the best in the world, and for the brand-new teenager from another planet who many believe can eventually be one of the greatest to ever play this game, and for the fans rooting for all of them to succeed.
The thing about progress is that it's not linear. You do your best and hope and believe that when you plot the high points and the low points over time, the trendline starts pointing in the right direction.
Kurt Vonnegut gave a hilarious and accurate lecture on how stories have shapes you can graph. From a man working his way into and out of a hole to Cinderella's ups and downs, he said these are shapes we see over and over again.
"This is an exercise in relativity really, it's the shape of the curves are what matters, and not their origins," he said.
So far, the shape of Wemby's story is that he was hailed as the chosen one from an early age, and now that he's starting his mission he and his friends are getting their butts kicked a little bit. Usually what happens next is that, through the trials and tribulations, the good guys figure out how to work together as the main character grows toward his potential. The challenges get progressively bigger (as do the stakes) until, finally, the protagonists win. Think the arcs of "Avatar: The Last Airbender," or "Harry Potter," or "Ratatouille."
A happy ending can make adversity at the beginning worth it, but you never really know how a good story is going to end. Spurs fans booed loudly every time Kawhi Leonard touched the ball, though the volume and intensity died down as he got hot and helped put the game away with 21 points and stifling defense on the new guy.
One fan stood up and called to him once the crowd quieted down later in the game:
"KAWHI! WHY DID YOU LEAVE US?! WE USED TO LOVE YOU! YOU BROKE MY HEART KAWHI!"
He said it in a way that was both goofing around and also 100% serious, speaking from a place most Spurs fans can relate to. Maybe he heard him, maybe he didn't. But that right there is sports fandom.
It's seeing your heroes up close, and sometimes watching them fail, and sometimes watching them find glory, and sometimes watching them turn into a villain.
It's passion, love, hate, drama, lore, growth and talking about it with your friends, family and Twitter.
Believe it or not I myself am a sports fan, and a somewhat tortured one in the last decade plus. I grew up in New York a spoiled supporter of the Yankees and Giants, but they haven't won anything since before I could grow facial hair. Now the hair on the top of my head is starting to go, and it's at least partially their fault.
As a proud Italian, it is my birthright to watch Ferrari dominate F1, but that's not what happens when I wake up at some obscene time on a Sunday to tune in to the race. The drivers are talented and the car is fast, but the entire team, from management to the strategists to the pit crew, regularly trips over themselves on simple little details in a way that makes me say, "Surely we can go to Brooklyn or Queens or even maybe Staten Island and find more competent Italians."
The thing that kills me with all of these teams is the hope. In every competition and every season, I can't and won't believe it's over until it's completely done. There is always a hope that they will go on a run, or get lucky, or find some other way to avert the same predictable disappointment served up in a particularly gut-wrenching way. After the inevitable happens I swear off the insanity of expecting a better result, and then at the start of the next game and the next season there I am, hopeful and insane again.
Right now, the Spurs have more reason to hope than any of the teams mentioned above.
As I walked from my seat down to the media work area, I jumped as a woman near the aisle yelled "DEFENSE" at full volume, right into my earhole. At this juncture, there were about three minutes left and the Spurs were down by 26. I chuckled and shook my head, but I know that's the kind of person I am and the kind of person I do this for. She cares.
Sports journalists are not supposed to root for the team they cover, certainly not like that. Cheering on press row is very much frowned upon, but even the true pros will raise their eyebrows when something good happens and grit their teeth when something bad happens. If you ask almost anyone in my profession privately, they'll probably admit that it's more fun when the home team succeeds, when the fans enjoy it, when the stadium and city feel alive because of it.
Journalists tell stories about real people in the communities they're a part of. Doing this job as an empathetic person means you'll probably feel something for the human beings you're tasked with telling the cold hard objective truth about, and that doesn't necessarily make you worse at the job.
That's what I came to when I sat down to write this: I was bummed out because I care. I care about all of the characters in the stories I tell, from the fans in the stands to the kids on the court to the accomplished septuagenarian calling the shots. You don't have to agree with all of them all the time to know that losing isn't fun for any of them, and that feeling was palpable Monday night.
Also palpable, though, was hope.
The longest-tenured Spur and resident energy guy Keldon Johnson came into the interview room Monday night a bit less boisterous than usual, but still friendly. He was surprised at how loud the mic was and joked about it, then the tech guy laughed and apologized, then everybody laughed as Keldon apologized to him.
Tom Orsborn, the Spurs scribe for the Express-News, asked Keldon about having a sense of humor in times like this, maybe taking a page from Pop's book.
"For sure, I like to joke around, I'm goofy. That's just me. Keep it light in here, not so serious all the time," he said in a somewhat muted voice while exposing the gap between his front teeth with a big smile.
"It's not easy to do in a losing streak," Orsborn pressed on, and thank goodness he did, because it resulted in Keldon actively working through and sharing with us the most profound thing I've seen him say since he got here. He slowed down and his voice turned contemplative as if he felt the gravity and wisdom of what he was saying and he wanted to make sure he got it right.
"I mean, yeah. But, we gettin' better. We're losing, I mean everybody knows that, but I'm gonna keep being myself, keep being energetic, cause the tide's gon' turn, and, you know, I'm still gonna be myself. So when we start winning, y'all are gonna say, 'KJ was the same person winning or losing,' and that's what it's gonna be. BUT! We gon' start winning. It's just a matter of time."