Is Pop's incompetency or the players just sucks?

[LeBowen]

Remind me again, who's the president of the team?
Ah, it's Pop.

The team doesn't suck. But they got 22 wins last year while actively trying to tank and noone played more than 65 games.
We were literally throwing away games by sitting our few good players based on matchups.

The entire roster was retained, we added Wemby who's obviously a class above everyone else on the team, even as a rookie and somehow that young core looks exponentially worse this season?
Just how?

[scott]

It’s both, and unfortunately we probably won’t move on from Pop and it’s probably not possible to completely overhaul the roster fast enough. Even if the GM went into turbo-mode on trying to remake the roster, it will be Wemby’s third or 4th season before he’s able to make discernible progress. By then, Wemby’s team will have already been thinking about being the first superstar to play under a QO and just go unto UFA after 5 years. Complete ing disaster.

It’s wild how this ownership group apparently has no ability to recognize this. They should be directing the FO to begin the complete roster overhaul as soon as possible, so that this team looks significantly different in the second half of the season, and completely different to start next season.

They keep talking about wanting to see what they have… I don’t know what else is needed to be seen: they have nothing but Wemby and a steaming pile of .

[jjspur]

I put most of the blame on Pop and the front office. Why ?
1. This is basically the same team from last year and it looks considerably worse - that's on pop and the front office.
2. The lineups are terrible. Sochan is not a PG. Why even try. Just use the current pg we have considering he's is getting paid a starters salary, has more experience at pg and it's his natural position. The Sochan experiment is a failure, change it and deal with it. It really can't get worse.
3. I think Pop knows how to coach vets, but young players he's completely clueless sometimes ruining their confidence by not playing them or playing them when they are completely overmatched.
4. The front office could have made a difference this summer but chose to get rid of players that could have helped a bit (other than the guy from Phoenix). Yeah I know, we got a few so so picks, but the players we got weren't going to get us to the playoffs. There is no Wemby in this year's draft to tank hard for. Might as well improve the team.
5. We probably need better assistant coaches as well.

[weebo]

Do you all realize this is the youngest team in the NBA? Has anyone considered the fact that in order to tank for Wemby the spurs had to get rid of all their best players, and Wemby isn’t good enough yet to make up for that?

Spurfan was as recently as a couple of years ago crying about getting rid of vets and letting the young guys run and start rebuilding...now that they have that they're crying about sucking with those same young dudes

[Ed Helicopter Jones]

Give Pop his Big 3 back plus a prime Bowen and they'd still be competing for championships, even with Grandpa Pop.

The players suck. I'm getting convinced that Brian Wrong is the Franchise Destroyer.

[Russo21]

Duncan, Parker, Manu and company could have won championships with the cast of Sesame Street on the bench coaching. Had nothing to do with Pops. In fact I believe they would have won an extra one or two without him.

You're right, our players suck. But all our complete and utter suckiness landed us Wemby so it turned out ok I suppose. We shouldn't be worse this year than last but we bloody are and it sucks, it's bull really. It's the decisions Brian Wrong makes in the next 2 off-seasons that worry me. We'll be getting a lottery pick this year, and many other picks in the next few years. He can't it up, we need to cement a decent line-up around Wemby and find some sort of direction for the team before it's time for Wemby to extend or he may leave this abomination. No more perverts who flash team psych's and get kicked off the team, no more Vassell's over Halliburton's, no more Sochan's over Sengun's and other ty decisions.

With the coaching thing. Continuity is good. Unless Pop is coaching until he is in his 90s with full blown dementia he is not Wemby's career long coach. The team need to be looking for that coach right now so they can grow together and develop a relationship together while Wemby is still young. The sooner he gets a new coach the better so he can ride out his career with continuity that coach. If Pop sticks around for now we'll be looking for a new coach halfway through Wemby's career and I don't see the good in that, so the sooner the better for me.

[TD 21]

Should be prefaced by "bigger issue:", since they're clearly inextricably linked.

I've said it ad nauseam for years, but they're not going anywhere until they expand their world view and stop with this narrow minded definition of what a Spur "should" be (this is how they end up with the debacle that is the '21-'22 drafts).

Unfortunately, that'll never happen until the genius is long gone and that's likely a long ways off.

[eric365]

Both. Roster has no logic
And Pop play players out of position on top of that
The tanking is obvious. You coud say Pop is great at achieving the worst record possible

But most of us would have liked tanking while developping players. A 25 wins season with the team progressing would have been nice.
Tre / vessel / mcdermott / sochan / wemby. With KJ and collins off the bench is still a very bad team that would get not that many wins
And I’d like to see a defensive and offensive system that would get more and more understood by the players as the season progress

[eric365]

Both. Roster has no logic
And Pop play players out of position on top of that
The tanking is obvious. You coud say Pop is great at achieving the worst record possible

But most of us would have liked tanking while developping players. A 25 wins season with the team progressing would have been nice.
Tre / vessel / mcdermott / sochan / wemby. With KJ and collins off the bench is still a very bad team that would get not that many wins
And I’d like to see a defensive and offensive system that would get more and more understood by the players as the season progress

That lineup and a bunch of other with (Tre, vessel, wemby) have positives net rating but are played very little
https://www.nba.com/stats/lineups/ad...ort=NET_RATING

The Tre / vessel / mcdermott / sochan / wemby has been played 11 minutes all season! For a netrating of 28…

[Tyronn Lue]

Both. Roster has no logic
And Pop play players out of position on top of that
The tanking is obvious. You coud say Pop is great at achieving the worst record possible

But most of us would have liked tanking while developping players. A 25 wins season with the team progressing would have been nice.
Tre / vessel / mcdermott / sochan / wemby. With KJ and collins off the bench is still a very bad team that would get not that many wins
And I’d like to see a defensive and offensive system that would get more and more understood by the players as the season progress

This wouldn't matter if the plan is to purge the roster next year.

[Portnoy1000]

If it were someone else coaching not named Pop they would be fired. What’s funny is Bob Hill got fired after the spurs started 3-17 with Robinson injured. Folks seem to forget how Pop got his HC gig. We can say the players are bad, but unlike most organizations the HC has a SIGNIFICANT impact on who comes and goes. POP unfortunately understands the dynamics of his position and that he WILL NOT get fired , so he can experiment and take his sweet time developing a phenom. Folks are giving him a pass, but for me that was last year. When you achieve the goal of getting Wemby then you immediately start building a roster that can compete. Ofcourse it won’t happen year one, or maybe even two. But you cannot regress and this team has regressed simply by the fact that there issues are the same and they have the same roster with a superior talent that was lacking. I put ALL the blame on Pop, because he approves the groceries Wright buys.

[Obstructed_View]

Legendarily poor coaching from a legendarily poor coach.

[cd98]

Really it's both, but it's more players sucking.

[gambit1990]

it's more so on the players but pop is president of the spurs so depending on pop's responsibility for personnel decisions ... it could be pop's incompetency.

with that being said, spo nor mike malone would be able to coach this roster to a play-in game.

[itzsoweezee]

This team is a lottery team regardless. But it’s not historically bad/much worse than last year without pop’s incompetence

[Splits]

25-21. Lot's of Popsuckers out there

[ambchang]

75% players 25% pop

but pop isn't playing to win (lol people who take pop's words at face value). he's playing to develop the potential core and evaluate the rest (lol people who don't take pop's words at face value)

I don’t understand how pop can evaluate players without coaching them to do the things they should do. What is he evaluating them on then? Mind reading? Somehow figuring out what rotations they should do when they are 20 years old? Doesn’t make any sense.

[Mugen]

The players "suck" because of Pop's incompetency tbh. He's the worst coach in the league.

[jermaine]

It's on Pop... He should put if foot down an get rid of anyone not falling in line. Learn from Kawhi's situation.

[Maddog]

Do you all realize this is the youngest team in the NBA? Has anyone considered the fact that in order to tank for Wemby the spurs had to get rid of all their best players, and Wemby isn’t good enough yet to make up for that?

1. Youngest team in the league
2. To date has had the highest strength of schedule (suspect record will improve over time)
3. they jettisoned a lot of veteran help. That's how they got Wemby and a lot of upcoming picks
4. In the past couple of years all but two western conference teams (a large number of EC teams) made a concentrated effort to either make the playoffs and or contend. Maybe some foolishly.

[RobinsontoDuncan]

1. Youngest team in the league
2. To date has had the highest strength of schedule (suspect record will improve over time)
3. they jettisoned a lot of veteran help. That's how they got Wemby and a lot of upcoming picks
4. In the past couple of years all but two western conference teams (a large number of EC teams) made a concentrated effort to either make the playoffs and or contend. Maybe some foolishly.

Yes, AND, for all the ing everyone here does, Pop has been developing all these guys. Let's look at Sochan for example. The difference from his debut last year to this year is night and day. Forget struggling as a PG, Jeremy had almost 0 offensive game when he came into the NBA. He couldn't shoot, couldn't his a FT, didn't know what he was doing on that end of the floor at all. Now he's developing PG skills. It is very upsetting that Vessel has regressed each year of defense, but it's hard to say how that's Pop's fault. His offensive improvement has been terrific however, from where he entered.

At the same time, the team is learning to play a high-IQ, motion-based system. That's hard to do for a bunch of teenagers and early 20-somethings. The benefits of all of this will be higher BB-IQ, more efficient offensive games later on.

[itzsoweezee]

Yes, AND, for all the ing everyone here does, Pop has been developing all these guys. Let's look at Sochan for example. The difference from his debut last year to this year is night and day. Forget struggling as a PG, Jeremy had almost 0 offensive game when he came into the NBA. He couldn't shoot, couldn't his a FT, didn't know what he was doing on that end of the floor at all. Now he's developing PG skills. It is very upsetting that Vessel has regressed each year of defense, but it's hard to say how that's Pop's fault. His offensive improvement has been terrific however, from where he entered.

At the same time, the team is learning to play a high-IQ, motion-based system. That's hard to do for a bunch of teenagers and early 20-somethings. The benefits of all of this will be higher BB-IQ, more efficient offensive games later on.

So all improvements are due to pop, and all the ways they’ve regressed is due to personal failures? Wow. Talk about magical thinking, or is this just cognitive dissonance?

Meanwhile, the areas where the coach has the biggest impacts, the schemes, have been complete trash. Mid-2000s style defense is getting crushed every night. The offense is unless the shooters get hot like they did yesterday.

As a team, they’ve regressed in every category, on track to be among the worst in nba history — but don’t blame that on pop, right

[RobinsontoDuncan]

So all improvements are due to pop, and all the ways they’ve regressed is due to personal failures? Wow. Talk about magical thinking, or is this just cognitive dissonance?

Meanwhile, the areas where the coach has the biggest impacts, the schemes, have been complete trash. Mid-2000s style defense is getting crushed every night. The offense is unless the shooters get hot like they did yesterday.

As a team, they’ve regressed in every category, on track to be among the worst in nba history — but don’t blame that on pop, right

When I watch, the defensive issues with Vessel look more like effort issues than scheme, but if you think it's something else, I'm open to being persuaded.

[Obstructed_View]

At the same time, the team is learning to play a high-IQ, motion-based system. That's hard to do for a bunch of teenagers and early 20-somethings. The benefits of all of this will be higher BB-IQ, more efficient offensive games later on.

oh Jesus.

[RC_Drunkford]

yea the team is bad, but there's no way the youngest team in the league should get worse after a 22 win season, a full offseason where the majority of them worked out together all while adding Victor Wembanyama. That's on the coach more than anything.

Also the team seems to lack effort a lot of times and people always been talking about how Pop can motivate his players. I don't think these guys really take him serious like in the old days.