Photo by Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Everything was great, right up until it wasn’t Didn’t like that. Nope. Not one bit. What’s that thing where you’re, like... ashamed? But not personally ashamed—you’re embarrassed for someone else, yet it hits so hard you feel that shame rattling around in your soul. I know the term secondhand embarrassment exists, but that doesn’t quite feel hefty enough for this. That loss was brutal. That Coby White dunk was brutal. The whole experience left me in a daze. I feel like my soul is just wandering around in a field, staring up at the night sky, trying to figure out my place in the universe right now. Histrionics aside, we can probably just add this one to the ever-growing “Learning Experience” file and move on with our lives. We’ve been banging the drum about young teams needing to learn how to win for years now, and this seems like a hump this particular Spurs team is banging up against at the moment. There’s no real indication it should stump them forever, so in the meantime, the rest of us are going to have to simply grin and bear it. I know it’s not a switch that can be flipped, but I’m sure it’ll feel silly when they finally get it unlocked. “What do you mean all we had to do was slow things down and not fall asleep on defense?” Even that is oversimplified, though. The fact is, I don’t know why this pattern of racing out to a lead and then letting off the gas keeps happening. Are they expending too much energy? Are they losing focus? Are other teams figuring them out? Hard to say. It’s never just one thing. It’s all the little stuff. Castle stops looking like an unreasonably seasoned vet all of a sudden. Wembanyama’s miraculous logo threes stop dropping. Devin can’t pick up the slack. Keldon and Barnes disappear into the background. Look, if you and I can feel it slipping away in real time, then I’m pretty sure our guys can feel it on the court. “Feeling it” and “doing something about it” is obviously where the disconnect is happening, because right now the response seems to be something closer to freezing up instead of taking action. It’s funny having Chris Paul out there because he’s sort of like a human barometer. You can read everything that’s happening in his body language. He gets almost manic out there—his entire being is vibrating, yelling, “LET’S GO. IT’S HAPPENING, LET’S GO!” And the sirens are going off, and the water is rushing in, and everyone is trying to bail it out, and then… Well. Then Coby White dunks on your 7’4” superstar, the crowd goes nuts, the highlights flood social media, and you just want to slink off into a corner and be anywhere else. It’s not the only way to lose a basketball game, but it’s a pretty effective one. I think we say something like this after every loss right now, but the Spurs are fine. They are demonstrably better than they’ve been in a long time and are now operating in a territory that comes with higher expectations. It should be a little harder right now. That’s kind of the whole deal, and Victor actually summed it up nicely in his postgame comments: “Right now, we should have more wins. But we don’t deserve more wins because this is where we are at.” 18-18. Roughly halfway through the season. In the playoff hunt. The Nuggets game last weekend. The Knicks game on Christmas. The Bulls game last night. These are the tests that the Spurs need to start passing and, until they do? This is where we’re at. Takeaways I have to take a second and admit that, from a pure basketball perspective, it’s objectively pretty cool to watch Chris Paul try to singlehandedly put out a fire that has suddenly engulfed our house. This is one of the greatest players in the history of the league, in the twilight of his career, wearing a Spurs jersey, running around out there in Alpha mode and almost pulling it off. It’s a sight to see. I’d certainly like to stop seeing it so often, but, you know. I guess I’ll try to enjoy the spectacle. Victor quietly disappearing down the stretch. It’s not a trend. It is... sort of... a thing to keep an eye on, though. “Disappear” is probably too strong a word for what’s happening here anyway. At least, it’s not nuanced enough. He’s a player who assumes a massive role on this team because his insane abilities on the court allow him to occupy that space. He anchors the defense and is a focal point on offense. He’s the master of the universe out there, and for, you know, three quarters or so, it seems like he can really live in that role and flourish. Things get a little trickier after that. Other teams are able to focus their attack on him with more clarity. They throw different looks his way, make him work harder, and ramp up the number of decisions he has to make. You can feel the degree of difficulty go up for him on offense, and the harder he has to work there, the more difficult it is for him to mop up after everyone on defense. I don’t have any answers here! I think he’s just used to being able to do everything because, historically speaking, he’s been able to pull that off. The rest of the NBA seems intent on telling him, “good luck with that!” He either needs a little more help, or he needs to, I don’t know, become even more of a basketball mutant/destroyer of worlds. I’m here for either option. To say that our brief window of being “Full Strength Spurs” was significantly briefer than we would’ve liked is an understatement. I guess we’re all “available,” but having people on minutes restrictions doesn’t equal “full strength” in my eyes. This is mostly just an excuse for me to say that I can tell Jeremy Sochan isn’t all the way right at the moment, and I’m pretty desperate for him to get there. Bit of a brutal stretch of schedule here for the boys, yeah? Lot of travel? Lot of good teams? Lot of time to figure things out, too. This doesn’t seem like a group that’s going to stay down for too long. WWL Post Game Press Conference - I like that in your opening paragraph, you ask for help identifying a feeling and then describe in perfect detail the concept of secondhand embarrassment. Then, after acknowledging that secondhand embarrassment exists, you go, “it’s not that though. It’s something else.” - Hey, look, I’ve been off for a few weeks during winter break, it’s sometimes hard to get the old Brain Worms firing on the first time back. - Yea. Seems like a bit of an unforced error though. You didn’t need the construct of asking the rhetorical question in there, you could’ve just described secondhand embarrassment and gone with that and been like, “Watching the end of the Spurs game, I felt secondhand embarrassment.” - I know, I could’ve done that, but I’m trying to get across that like....I don’t know. What I felt was worse than secondhand embarrassment. I was watching the Spurs fall apart and I felt like, you know, it was me who was falling apart instead of them. - Again, that’s almost word for word, the definition of secondhand embarrassment. - Fine, you made your point. I’ll do better next time, there’s nothing I can do about it now. - Yes there is! You’re typing this right now! You haven’t sent this in to the editors! No one has hit publish! You can go fix it! - Nope, nothing to be done. You’re living in the past and I’ve set my lawn chair up at my new house in the future. We’re on to Milwaukee!