Monday: Spurs Not Jazzed After Latest Game

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'll say a blowout, but a pretty easy win for
a Utah. I think when you have a team that's
as young as the Spurs are, and I'm not making
a soft bed for him or making excuses. They're talented
players who I think we'll do some amazing things, and
the streak that they were on, I think there comes
a time when you need to exhale. I I'm sure

(00:26):
this conversation will come up again when we start our
basketball coaches shows. And Karen Askeden, the women's coach at UTSA,
has pointed out the last several years that when the
team gets to February, they kind of hit a wall.
And when you hit this wall, it's because you expect
your season to be over with by now. You've played

(00:46):
X amount of games. The calendar says it's getting ready
to be spring. You're planning your spring break, and you're
not used to playing deep into March. And so it
takes a special group to experience that several times to understand, Okay,
we still have a season to go. The Spurs are
what now twenty four and eight, is that their record

(01:07):
twenty three and eight, they played to night, They played
a night, so they're twenty three and eight. That's thirty
one games. That is a college basketball regular season. The
guys that are on this team, not Whimby, but certainly
Castle and Harper and Carter and the young players that
have been on this team for a year or two.
In their biological mind, if you will, season's over, the

(01:29):
season's over, we're getting ready for the CAA tournaments. And oh,
by the way, we still have fifty more games to play.
And that is a mental hurdle that takes a while
for young players to figure out, because there is an
exhaustion level that comes with getting up to play the
Thunder and beating them three times like they did finishing

(01:50):
them off on Christmas Day. There is, and it's what
separates veteran good teams from young up and coming teams
is their ability to realize, we're going to play as
many games in two months as you did in five
that we're going to play basically before the season's over.

(02:10):
If you get all the way to the NBA finals,
three to four times more games than you ever played
in college, and the season is not November to February,
with the postseason in March. Training camp starts the last
weekend in September, and you hope you're playing two weeks
away from Fourth of July. It is a long marathon season,

(02:33):
and to me, that was one of those games last
on Saturday night. I didn't get to see it, but
I was listening to Dan for a good chunk of
the game where it just seemed like they were stuck
in the mud. Everything they did didn't work, and it
was like, Okay, can we just take a breather here?
We need a day off. And it's kind of like
baseball players in bull Durham hoping for a rainout. You

(02:53):
know they need a rain out now. This NBA schedule
doesn't give you much of one until you get to
the All Star break, where you get five or six
days off unless you're an All Star. But a lot
of the players don't necessarily take advantage of just resting relaxation.
They want to be a part of All Star festivities
even if they're not an All Star, and so they

(03:14):
end up in Vegas or wherever the All Star Game
is doing all Star festivities. I just look at it
from this perspective, I think the Spurs are okay. I'm
going to give them a mulligan here. My guess is
there'll be one or two more of these games where
you scratch your head and go, how'd you just beat
the Thunder three times in two weeks and then lose
to the Jazz? And the Jazz are going to be
a good team in two or three years. But the

(03:35):
Jazz are what the Spurs have been the last two
or three years, a team that's going to sneak up
and beat some teams they shouldn't, but probably not make
it past thirty thirty four wins. And this is where
the Thunder I don't think would have lost that game
last night because they're better than the Jazz and they
know it now. The Thunder are a little bit concerned

(03:56):
about how they've lost to loss of the Spurs three times.
There is some major concern on that, but I think
the Thunder feel like we'll be fine against all these
teams because we've experienced this before. And while I give
the Spurs a little bit of a pass for the
Thunder for the Utah game, I don't want to see
it happen more than once or twice again in the
season because then you start to revert to what you

(04:19):
used to be before you realize how good you were.
I think this is at worst right now, the way
they're playing the second best team in the league.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Now.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
That doesn't mean they'll be the second best team in
the league by the time the year's over. But right now,
even though they've beaten the Thunder three times and even
though they're playing the best basketball, I would pencil in
the Spurs right now is a two seed because I
think they're better than Denver in Minnesota. But games like
this can't happen very often because these are teams you

(04:49):
have to beat in order to get to that sixty
win plateau, which is the level that the Spurs are
on pace to go to.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, even despite the loss, I still think the Spurs
are still the best team in the NBA at this moment.
Watching this game, there was a couple thing that stood
out to you. One was you were relieved to see
winby play nearly thirty minutes. In that regard, he had
thirty two points five blocks, a five block game after
no blocks the night before. He came back with the vengeance.
I appreciate that, But the thing that really irritated me
Andy is that they forced and missed a lot of

(05:20):
three point shots. Their starters were four out of thirty
from three point range. They were ten for forty four
as a team.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Overall.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
The only player that was really sinking the threes from
was Kelden who sunk five by himself, so he made
half the three point shots they made against the Utah
team who really in the first quarter that Santino was
control with the way they should the second quarter, things
fell apart. They had an eighteen point turnaround the second
quarter by itself with guys like Lauri markin and making
multiple threes. Keyante George was a big factor of this game,

(05:50):
a guy who I hate going back to the college days,
and Walter Clayton junior at his time at Florida as
a Red Raider. They knocked my team out in the
last couple of minutes of that game. This is a
this is a jazz team, yes, that has very much
been off them. And the best way to describe, and
I heard this I forgot who said it on the
on the pregame on the TV pre game, was that
this Utah team is very much an offensive centric team

(06:12):
that's still learning defense. And you talked about how they
kind of remind you a little bore with the Spurs
were a couple of years ago, and that's fair. It's
not the same defensive though, because the.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Spurs, I don't think they are the team from a
couple of years ago. But the team from a couple
of years ago also hit that wall and they weren't
experienced and they were figuring out how good they were.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
But I don't put the wall on on like all
the entire team, because only only only four guys in
the last like three years on this team or in
college at this point. These are these are season bests, right.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Well, but the four guys Castle, Wimby, Carter Bryant, Dillon
and Dan Dylan, those guys have not experienced eighty two
games and now they're at the thirty one game mark
and they're sitting there going, we've got fifty more of
these to go.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Well, we should know by now.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, but but but Weimby and Wemby hasn't played a
whole season. He's been hurt proportions of the last two seasons.
And Wemby doesn't play even the leagues that he played
in in uh in France. I mean, what are they
fifty game seasons and Wemby's missed twelve games, so and
Wemby played well on Saturday for the most part did

(07:18):
But I just think that young teams have to get
past the mental hurdle more than anything else of how
long the season is and how you have to be
sharp each and every game you play, because there's other
teams out there that are pros too, and they're going
to have a have a chance to beat you. All right,
coming up in the six o'clock hour, we're going to

(07:40):
talk about Marcus Freeman. And also John Calipari is in
the news again, so we got that. Cal said something
that I've been thinking about for a while. And now
the college football ball matchups are all set. Who's going
to win these four quarterfinal matchups this weekend? We'll discuss
that next It's five twenty nine on the ticket.