The San Antonio Spurs are ailing and exhausted. They've lost four in a row and are 5-7 in the month of the December with still a killer slate of games to go until the calendar finally flips to a hopefully healthier 2015.
Knock on wood.
Yet even with his team skidding and in seventh place in the Western Conference, and as close to being out of the playoffs as they are to tonight's opponent, the sixth-place Los Angeles Clippers, eternally grumpy coach Gregg Popovich says he's incredibly proud of his team.
Really.
"I thought it was great. I thought we were great," Popovich said following the Spurs' 99-93 loss Saturday at Dallas. "Really proud of them."
It's important to clarify "them." They were not the usual suspects, yet again. Popovich made eight players available for the game. His entire starting lineup, plus sixth man Manu Ginobili was out with either injuries or on ordered rest coming off the rarity of suffering consecutive triple-overtime losses to Memphis on Wednesday and then to Portland the night before playing the Mavs.
Yet on the night when Dallas introduced Rajon Rondo as its new point guard, the reserve Spurs â with Cory Joseph, Marco Belinelli, Boris Diaw, Aron Baynes and rookie Kyle Anderson making up a most unusual starting lineup â led almost the entire way and were tied 93-93 with two minutes to go, only to be undone by better execution from the Mavs' regulars.
"We could have handled the ball better," Popovich said. "Giving up 25 points off turnovers on the road is not going to make it easy to win a game, but I thought the effort and the play out of these guys was really spectacular."
During this longest losing skid since 2011, two players from San Antonio's playoff rotation last year played in all four games. Point guard Tony Parker (hamstring) and NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard (bruised right hand) didn't play in any of them.
As the Clippers come to town tonight, Leonard remains out, but as of Monday morning, Parker's status was elevated to questionable. He's missed the last five games, eight of nine and nine of 12. So that's progress.
If he doesn't play tonight, it at least sounds like he'll be a go for the Christmas Day game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are again without Kevin Durant and desperate for wins still out of the playoff mix.
At least then the Spurs will have a chance to regain some rhythm to their rotation as the schedule doles out two games against New Orleans and one each against Houston and Memphis before a much more favorable stretch will steer San Antonio through January and into the All-Star break.
"It's rusty, it's not there the way it was last year," shooting guard Danny Green said of the team's current chemistry. "It could be due to injuries, it could be due to the schedule, a little bit of both. But for the most part, we're not going to make any excuses, it's due to us not trusting each other the way we were last year with moving the ball offensively, and defensively just rotating and trusting that the next guy will be there. A couple of easy things to fix and I think we will fix them."
The Spurs played their way through injuries last season to 62 wins, but the majority of those missed games came during a much smoother stretch of schedule against Eastern Conference teams.
Poor timing marks this bout with the Spurs grinding it out against almost exclusively West contenders. It's also a stretch that includes six sets of back-to-backs in December, with two more to come. Those typically take Tim Duncan, and at times also Manu Ginobili, out of action for the second of the those sets.
"I'm proud of the whole team and what they have done," Popovich told reporters after Friday's loss to Portland. "It's a different group every night. It would almost be better if you had two guys injured and you knew it for three months."
Popovich and the Spurs won't fret about this current stretch, even if it could become difficult to work back up the standings into a top-four spot and gain homecourt advantage for the first round.
If a silver lining is to pulled from this so-far dreary December, perhaps the Spurs will soon look back at this adversity, point to their nightly fight no matter the lineup, and realize this stretch as the time the team came together.
