It just felt nice to be watching basketball. Everything going on in L.A. right now is horrifying on a scale that’s hard to even comprehend and, as usual, when the horrors of the world start closing in, sports tend to find a way to be a centering force. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t bring back anything that was lost. It just makes us feel good, if only for a little bit. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

Purely on a basketball level, I needed the Spurs to show me a little life. Not a ton, mind you, but a little. This recent stretch against a decent lineup of teams promised to be a test for a group of guys who are trying to figure it out, and that test has so far definitively proved that they are indeed still in the “figuring it out” process. It’s nothing too surprising, but I think it’s fair to say it’s been a bit disappointing. Progress certainly isn’t linear and, while there’s no doubt the Spurs have made progress this season, I think we’re all itching for that next little indicator that things are still headed in the right direction.

The first half was grim. Well, not grim — maybe just lackluster. Staid. Pallid. Blah. Pick your uninspiring descriptor. They weren’t playing “bad,” but they also didn’t seem to have much spark. That’s certainly to be expected, given the week they’ve had hanging out in a hotel while the real world raged on outside. As the Lakers pushed out to a double-digit lead, I was ready to pack it in. This wasn’t going to be the game where they found it, and it would be weird for me to expect them to, under the circumstances.

There’s probably a lesson in here somewhere about patience or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like that thing where you’re frantically tearing your house apart looking for a lost item and only when you’ve given up hope does it turn up under your nose. The Spurs rallied in the second half. In fact, they didn’t just rally—they came alive.

It was almost bizarre to see them flip a switch like that. Out of nowhere, our guys morphed into this hyper-aggressive behemoth on defense that wouldn’t stop hounding the Lakers at every turn. Did someone clue them in on the secret tip that intensity on the defensive end makes it difficult for your opponent to score? I loved it. What an adjustment!

We say this all the time, but the Spurs aren’t broken or anything like that; they’re just not fully formed. Some pieces are missing. No one’s exactly sure what the next phase of the Spurs is going to look like, but in the meantime, we’re just going to be sitting here watching guys continue to learn how to play a full NBA season night after night. Chris Paul is going to yell at them, Harrison Barnes is going to set a good example, and the kids are going to try to follow their lead. Most of the time, they’ll fall short, but every once in a while, it’ll all click into place.

That’s when we get to see something like that fourth quarter happen — everything falling into place, shots dropping, a brick-wall defense, transition buckets, ball movement, the whole shebang. The degree of difficulty in doing that every game is incredibly high, and the fact that this team can pull it off at a decent clip is a sort of miracle I’m probably not grateful enough for.

All of that being said, at the end of the day, it just felt nice to spend an evening watching some guys play basketball. If only for a little bit.

Takeaways

• I lived in Los Angeles from 2011 through 2021 — almost ten years exactly. It’s not where I’m from, but it was certainly home for a very long time. It has been impossibly sad to watch that place go up in flames on TV this past week. I can barely put it into words. That amount of destruction is so hard to fathom, and nothing I can say here will make any of it better. I know we all kind of clown on L.A. from time to time — myself included — but it really is a special place full of so many incredible people. I hope that, through all of this pain, they’re able to find peace and strength in the coming months and years as we all try to help put that city back together.
• Something clicked for me about this team’s defensive effort last night that, I’m sure, smarter people than me have noticed — but whatever. I think Victor Wembanyama’s prowess on that side of the floor, while obviously an advantage, can lure our guys into a false sense of security. Vic is simply so good at cleaning up everyone’s messes that it allows people to cut corners. Even if it’s not a conscious decision, I think it’s just easy for guys to pull a punch here and there from an effort perspective because they know they have a 7’4” safety net behind them. They get away with it a lot because, you know, he really is that good. But it’s habit-forming. He can’t fix everything, and he’s also not always on the floor. Sometimes you’ll see someone get too casual letting their guy blow by on the baseline, then realize half a second too late that it’s Chuck Bassey back there instead of Vic. As usual, I’m not sure how to fix this other than to point it out and write on the chalkboard, “Don’t do that,” with three big lines underneath. Maybe an exclamation point? That might be something to save for late in the season.
• I have no idea how Chris Paul was able to compartmentalize everything going on with his family this week and still go out there and ball, but, man, it was a pleasure to watch him do it.
• That was a nice little offensive burst from Stephon Castle. I know we don’t want to rely on him for that, but it’s pretty cool to see him flex that muscle every now and then. I’d also like to use this space to wonder aloud, for the umpteenth time, “Why the hell did we ever let Chip Engelland leave?!?!?!” I just… I will never get it. What amount of money was too much to keep maybe the most important figure in Spurs franchise history (Non-Tim-Tony-Manu-Pop division)? It makes me want to put a hole in my wall every time I think about it. Then I remember that not only is he gone, he’s in OKC teaching our long-term rivals all his little secrets, and I want to put yet another hole in the wall. I’m not sure I have enough walls to handle this Chip Engelland situation.

WWL Post Game Press Conference

– Is it kind of fun that the Lakers have “LakeShow” on their jerseys? I thought it was kind of fun.

– Thanks for asking me this, it’s a really good question. The answer is “sure”. Sure, its fine that they have LakeShow on their jersey. That’s not the problem. The problem is that those jerseys are lame in every single other way. How does this leagues premier franchise, located in one of the most creative cities in the world, have a jersey that looks like it was thrown together in photoshop by someone who was handed an Adobe subscription three days ago? The black awkwardly fading into purple? This mishmash shorts? It’s just disappointing. I could care less about it saying Lakeshow.

– Ah. So…you do NOT think it’s fun?

– I just wish that if they were going to shove all these City Edition uniforms down our throats that they would at least have a league wide mandate that they weren’t allowed to be “boring and intelligible from a design perspective”

– That seems like a hard thing to enforce.

– Well that’s just because they haven’t asked me be in charge yet. I’m still available and my rates are pretty reasonable. Call me Adam!