Popovich blasts Spurs' defense
By Jeff McDonald - Express-News
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In a moment of truth just before the Spurs took the floor Saturday night in Chicago, coach Gregg Popovich opened up to inquiring minds about all that was wrong with his club.
The laundry list of problems was so small it would fit on a Post-It note. It was just one item, really. But in Popovich's world, it was a biggie.
“We suck on ‘D,'” Popovich said, with the “D” standing for defense.
That was the entire text of Popovich's State of the Team address, as succinct as it was devastating. All follow-up questions fishing for a silver lining were quickly rebuffed.
Do you mean all game long, or just in fourth quarters?
“No, pretty much throughout,” Popovich said. “Both individually and team-wise, we suck. We're pretty consistent that way.”
Surely there is a way to fix this problem, some sliver of hope on the horizon?
“I don't know if I have an answer to that,” Popovich said. “If I did, we wouldn't suck quite so bad.”
A suffocating defense has long been the Spurs' calling card, the common thread that has hung four NBA championship banners in their home arena.
This season, the Spurs are 26-13 and sitting atop the Southwest Division. But, in a flip from years past, Popovich believes his team's success has come in spite of its defense, not because of it.
Heading into today's MLK Day matinee at Charlotte, which caps a three-game road swing, the Spurs rank eighth in the NBA in scoring defense, surrendering 94.2 points per game.
That number isn't so bad. To Popovich, it also is largely irrelevant.
A truer measure of a team's defensive effectiveness, he believes, is its field-goal percentage defense. It is the first number he looks at when handed the box score at the end of the night.
In Popovich's 11 full seasons on the bench, the Spurs never have finished worse than fifth in the NBA in that category. So far this season, they rank 21st. Opponents are shooting 46 percent against them.
The Spurs also are giving up a 36.9 percentage from 3-point range, 19th in the league.
A firm believer that a team eventually gets what it deserves, Popovich cringes to think of the comeuppance due the Spurs if they don't begin to boost their defensive numbers to familiar levels. And quickly.
“The only thing that's saving us is that everybody else is beating everybody else up, so our record looks basically as good as anybody else's,” Popovich said. “It's fool's gold, as far as I'm concerned.”
Rock bottom for the Spurs' defense came in Philadelphia, during a 109-87 loss that opened the road trip Friday night.
The 76ers shot 50 percent from the field, 57 percent from the 3-point line, and alley-ooped their way to 30 fast-break points en route to handing the Spurs their most lopsided defeat of the season.
Essentially, the Sixers transformed the Wachovia Center into their own personal pick-up game, with the defenseless Spurs as an unwitting foil.
Perhaps inspired by their head coach's not-so-gentle public pregame prodding, or the sheer humiliation of what happened in Philadelphia, the Spurs turned in one of their better defensive performances of the season a night later in Chicago. They held the Bulls without a field goal in the final 3:13 to lock up a 92-87 victory.
Afterward, however, the Spurs resisted the urge to declare themselves cured of all their defensive ills.
“We were better,” point guard Tony Parker said. “It's a good first step.”
The next step comes today at Charlotte. Physically, the Spurs are in North Carolina, the Tar Heel State.
Philosophically, however, they find themselves in a show-me state of mind — as in, “show me” the defensive stand they took against the Bulls is more than just a one-night wonder.
“It's just one game,” Tim Duncan said. “Now you have to build on that. If we go back to the way we've been playing, this game doesn't mean anything. It starts with one game, and you build from there.”
It might be the one way for the Spurs to silence their most vocal critic, their head coach.
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