Photo by Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images The Spurs look great and terrible in equal measure Let me take you on a little peek behind the curtain of the “What We Learned” process today. Maybe you didn’t ask for this, but you also didn’t ask for the Spurs to blow a 26-point first-half lead, so maybe it isn’t always about what you asked for, is it? Anyway, when it’s my turn to write one of these things, I sit down at my desk and log into our blogging platform. I write the headline, I write the sub-headline, and I pick out a little picture from Getty Images. Then I gaze down the page and confront a giant white space just waiting to be filled with my cool, smart, and important thoughts about what went down during the game the night before. Exciting stuff! I try my best to just sort of let it rip. We do lots of well-thought-out and well-reasoned analysis on this site that you absolutely should go read if you want to understand the Spurs or the game of basketball better on any fundamental level. PTR has a whole host of amazing writers who are here to break down the ins and outs of the sport for you, and I read them every day so that I can even pretend for a little bit that I might be smart and know what I’m talking about. For “What We Learned,” well, I try to find a different lane. Ironically, this is the last place you should head if you want to learn anything. In this space, it’s more about what we feel—a snapshot of a place in time that happened so we don’t forget it later. Why am I bringing this up? Is it because I don’t want to really engage with a basketball game that forced me to stay up into the wee hours of the night while my favorite team slowly and methodically bled out on the table? Of course it is! But also other reasons as well! I want to talk about what this is and what it isn’t. I want to clear out some space for you to really understand my intentions and get at the heart of why I might say the things that I say in the way that I say them. So let’s say I log in this morning after that performance last night. I’m looking at this big, stupid blank space and trying to figure out what tact I want to approach it from. Do I go fire and brimstone? Should I just really tear them a new one? The team stinks. Fire everyone. Wemby needs to take a hint and stop trying to be a shooting guard. CP is washed. Sochan is a rotation player at best. What is even the point of any of these guys? See, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve done that move already this year, and it didn’t feel productive. How about sad? Get real Charlie Brown with it. They aren’t good now, and they never will be. Cooper Flagg had a pretty sweet dunk last night; maybe we should just pack it in already and try again next year? Gotta turn it off for a few weeks. I can only care as much as they do, and they clearly don’t. That doesn’t seem like the vibe. Sometimes it feels good to go emo, but it’s not how we really get down around here, and it’s probably the furthest from the truth of the matter. Optimistic? That can be an interesting take in the face of a disappointing loss. It’s just one game. The season is still so young—almost as young as our players! Losing Sochan in the second half was a big deal; he’s good now! They’re going to learn from this. It’s all still in line with expectations. The only way to get better is through hardship. Keep pounding the rock! That’s probably the closest take we have to what’s actually going on, at least in a basketball sense. Does it feel genuine, though? Not really. Not to me, at least. The truth is that I don’t feel optimistic in the moments or even days after a loss like this. I desperately want to take a macro approach to understanding a basketball season, but that’s really hard when the activity you’re engaging with is full of all these little micro endpoints that you have to sit and stew with for a few days before you get more data to input. A loss stinks. The reasons for the loss are less important to me than the result, and the result is a bummer. Someone who is good at math, please help. I don’t know. All of this filibustering up there has just been me trying to buy time because eventually, I’m going to have to figure out how I felt about this game and write it down here for you to read. The game wasn’t all that important, at least in a cosmic sense, but it felt important in the moment, and it feels very real to me this morning. I’m still in the process of toning my expectations down from their, admittedly, lofty place at the beginning of the season, and the Clippers... man, it just seems like this should be one of those games that the Spurs win. I watched them lighting the world on fire in the first quarter and was just like, “Yes. This is it. They’re doing it!” Only to watch it disintegrate over the next three quarters. I’d love to be the kind of guy who shrugs it off, but if I was that kind of guy, then PTR probably wouldn’t have me on Vibe Check duty. The Spurs are what they are. They are neither as bad as they seemed for long stretches of last night nor as good as I would like them to be at any given moment. They’re working on it. I know they are, and hey, look, I’m working on myself too. I should have a healthier attitude about this entire operation. There’s like 75 more of these things we have to get through and I’m not sure I’m going survive if I have to do a Dewey Cox and think about my whole life before I write about What We Learned. Takeaways: Hey, obviously nothing but good thoughts are being sent towards Coach Pop. That’s kind of first and foremost the most important thing. We obviously don’t know anything in any detail about what’s going on, but regardless, I’m wishing him well and hope he gets back on the sideline sooner rather than later. I guess it’s a good sign that Wembanyama can still put up a stat line like this while objectively having kind of a stinker? Am I the only one who feels that way? He obviously had his highlight moments and did plenty of good things, but none of it felt very put together. His shooting is still... I mean, I guess he’s got to keep putting ‘em up because that’s what opposing defenses are going to give him for the rest of his career. But it’s kind of painful to watch him bang his head against that particular wall over and over as the offense kind of stalls out around him. Learning process. It’s all a learning process. He’s learning. I’m learning. We’re learning. Together. Learning. Learned. I am become learnt. I was trying to save a bullet point where I lavish praise on Julian Champagnie for after a win, but at this rate, it looks like I’m only signed up for games where the Spurs intend on beefing it, so I’m going to go ahead and do it now. He’s been such a bright spot early in this season, and I’m so happy for him. What a treat to have someone confidently taking and making threes at a consistent rate! I almost forgot what that was like! Remember that time when CP hit him with the casual behind-the-back pass and he didn’t even blink while catching and draining it from deep? I was so sure we were back in control and winning the game at that point, and boy, was I wrong. Anyway, loving my guy Champagnie and excited to lavish more praise in the future. Time to finish.END 3 | SAS 86, LAC 82 pic.twitter.com/7Dr2dNooks— San Antonio Spurs (@spurs) November 5, 2024 Lol that the the text of that embedded tweet is “Time to finish.” Yea! It sure was! Then what happened? WWL Post Game Press Conference - Interesting choice to go Post Game Press Conference Mode for the entire body of the column up there. - Yea, for sure. Look, I know that’s not a lever I can pull all the time or anything like that. Getting overly meta is sort of like a magic trick that people think is novel until they realize there usually isn’t too much substance behind it. It’s like biting into a cake and realizing the entire thing is made of frosting. - What made it seem like this was the right time for it? - I just didn’t feel like belching out another overly emotional rant about how annoyed I am at the Spurs without giving some context about the fact that like, you know, I know that this is all pretty silly, right? Like...I understand that it’s a pretty hot, reactionary take to be like “THIS TEAM STINKS” when they lose the 5th game of the season. But I also want to emphasize that it isn’t theater either! I’m not Stephen A. Smith firing off takes for no reason. This is actually just how I’m feeling. - Maybe you should petition to rename the column “What We Felt about the Spurs loss to the Clippers”.” - Yea, like I said up there, don’t you dare try to learn anything from this. If you take anything away from this column other than “this man is far too emotional at 6am” then you’re reading too much into it.