Photo by Brian Sevald/NBAE via Getty Images A budding win streak is rudely tossed aside Not even a week since Sandro Mamukelashvili restored my faith in basketball, the Spurs and, frankly, life itself, I found myself deeply back in the pit. Which pit? The one of despair. The one where you’re languishing around in an unwashed hoodie, covered in unidentifiable snack remnants, questioning your sanity. It’s a bad pit, and I found myself in it. However! I made a pledge to myself and to you, the reader, that I was going to pull it together and try to enjoy these last few weeks of Spurs basketball. So please, take my hand, and come with me. Let’s climb out of this pit together. Top 5 Reasons not to stay in The Pit 5. Devin Vassell has been playing better. He has! I can feel the skepticism already oozing out of the sides of this one, but bear with me. He’s averaging close to 20 points a game in the last month or so, in addition to showing a little bit more of the dynamic playmaking we’re all sort of counting on being a part of the overall Devin Vassell experience. Maybe it’s just the absence of some of our brighter stars, but he seems to have quietly become a little more confident, consistent, and versatile recently. Last night was a perfect example of the type of player he can be. He was efficient and aggressive and was making plays left and right. You could probably argue that the results of this game are a testament to the limits a “good” Devin Vassell can yield, but an attitude like that isn’t going to get you out of the pit very fast, is it? For now, the fact that he seems to be back to his old self is reason enough for optimism. The Spurs don’t need Devin to be the second banana to Victor, they just need him to be a pretty good banana. 4. We still get to watch Chris Paul play for the Spurs. Maybe “get to” is a bit of a stretch here if you’ve still somehow not managed to let go of any latent CP hate. Here’s the thing though—biases aside, the guy is a legend. He’s one of those dudes that people are just going to be talking about forever whenever the game of basketball is being discussed. He’s not just a Hall of Famer, he’s a foundational player from this era of the game. The fact that we get to see him, night in and night out, wearing a Spurs jersey and representing San Antonio is pretty cool. The fact that he’s kind of balling out, as opposed to just treating this like a retirement cruise, is even more amazing. I have no idea what the Spurs would’ve looked like without him this season, but I can hazard a guess that the answer would range somewhere between “worse” and “yikes.” That’s not even factoring in the benefits we’re going to see from this residency down the line. The wisdom he’s able to impart on our budding crop of players is almost impossible to quantify. I don’t think a sentence like “Steph Castle’s Rookie of the Year campaign” exists without Chris Paul in the locker room. That’s a gift, and we should treat it as such. 3. Speaking of “Steph Castle’s Rookie of the Year campaign,” how about Steph Castle’s Rookie of the Year campaign? That’s a fun little treat we weren’t necessarily expecting, yeah? I mean, I think we all liked the pick when it happened. Maybe we even loved it! But I know I didn’t see this coming. I thought he would be good, and I thought he would show brief glimpses of his future potential while he learned the ropes and got his feet wet in the league. Instead he just decided to be great, straight away? That’s insane. On top of being, you know, statistically good, he’s also an utter joy to watch every night. He’s hyper-athletic and plays with a physicality and fearlessness that I can’t get enough of. The Spurs have a dude throwing down nasty in-traffic dunks with regularity! I mean, shoot, if that’s all he was doing he’d still be a major pillar of the “Don’t Stay in the Pit” campaign. We need to soak up every second of this rookie season because it feels important. We’re watching something special happen in real time. 2. SANDRO MAMUKELASHVILI. YOU GOTTA GET OUT OF THE PIT BECAUSE MAMU MIGHT SHOW US SOME MAGIC AGAIN. YOU CAN’T MISS A MAMU NIGHT! I’m kidding about this one. I mean, not really, but kind of. While you should 1000% always be on alert for a Mamu Night, he alone isn’t a reason to get out of the pit. However, Mamu and the rest of his cohorts are definitely a reason to stay locked in down the stretch. Guys like Blake Wesley and Julian Champagnie. Malaki Branham. Things of that nature. These are guys who I am very fond of and who, if we’re being honest with ourselves, maybe aren’t going to get to continue on the journey up the mountain with us. They’re good players. They’re good Spurs. They are putting in shifts with this team that I think we need to take time and space to appreciate and honor them. It’s all a part of the bigger, wider ecosystem of the NBA that we’re swimming in, and that’s an important perspective to keep a grasp on. 1. None of this matters! OK hear me out on this one, but I think it might be good for us to have some low-to-no stakes basketball in our lives a little bit longer. I thought I was ready to be back in the mix. I wanted the smoke and the bright lights and the high-profile matchups and all the everything that comes with it. I still want that, and I’m still frustrated that we have to wait, but sometimes the universe is really good at giving you things you need instead of things you want. If we were gearing up for the playoffs right now I would be a mess. I’d be sweating matchups that probably aren’t even going to happen. I’d be stress-listening to NBA podcasts I don’t even like just on the off chance they might say something about the Spurs that I can vigorously nod along with or vehemently write off as uninformed nonsense. That life is coming for us, and I don’t know if we’re ready. We gotta get into shape. Start eating better and living cleaner. Maybe start meditating? I don’t know, we’ll figure it out. But my point in all of this is that we should enjoy games like Tuesday night’s dismantling at the hands of the Pistons. Why? Because they deftly pulled us apart (without their best player, mind you) and it just... didn’t matter. 26-point loss? Like it never happened. Embarrassing display of basketball? Maybe. Who could say. I’ve already moved on. You can too! We all can! This game didn’t matter! What a blessing. We got to watch a little basketball and move on with our lives. How could you possibly spend a beautiful day like this languishing in a pit? Get out of the pit! WWL Post Game Press Conference - A little power ranking? A classic of the online sports guy genre. - Yea, I wanted to try it out just a little bit. I certainly didn’t want to look too hard at the actual gameplay from last night, I’ll tell you that much. - Yikes, was it really that bad? - It was pretty rough! The whole thing was basically out of pocket by the end of the first half and like... yea. We were getting cooked by Tobias Harris. If you’ve paid even cursory attention to the NBA over the last 5 to 6 years, then the idea that Tobias Harris is doing any cooking of anything should be pretty upsetting. - Do you think this was an aberration? Or was the little win streak the weird one? - I’m not going to pretend to know anything anymore. This part of the season is sort of a twilight zone, with every team moving in weird different directions with different motivations and different capabilities on any given night. Effort? Energy? Engagement? All extremely variable and volatile and probably other words that start with V. The only thing I know with any certainty is that this particular Spurs team is capable of beating anyone in the league at any given time and is equally capable of losing to me and my friends down at the Y. - You know with certainty that the Spurs could lose a pickup game to you and your friends at the Y? - They certainly could. It’s the twilight zone, bud. Anything could happen. ...read more read less