I disagree pretty strongly with the grade for TP. Not only was his 10 of 16 shooting dismissed with "scored in bunches BUT", but his three steals pretty much belies the observation regarding "average or below on defense". His assist numbers were down from his average because Tim couldn't hit the side of a barn, and Tim is the where the ball goes at the beginning of our offensive set. Moreover, two of the turnovers assigned to Tony should have been on Tim because Tim just seemed too lackadaisical to haul the ball in. One more should have gone to Ginobili because Tony delivered the ball at the end of the game to the PRECISE spot on the court where every Spur player for 11 seasons is supposed to be in the offensive scheme, but Ginobili had taken himself out of there. But Tony gets the turnover.
The offense started looking so bad, imo, when Tony, after hitting some shots early on, starting passing out to others to take shots, and then they would just stand there. Way too often in the last couple of games, our shooters have gotten the ball and hesitated before shooting, allowing the defense to arrange themselves into a good defensive position. I think that is a result of playing some pretty bad defensive teams where we got in the habit of not being challenged too much on our shots. Now, when a team shuts down the lane (always a good ploy against us), TP has to give the ball to someone else and then that person has to pass or shoot quickly. None of that has been happening. It happened with Tim last night, it happened with Neal last night, big time, and I'm not sure that Green even touched the ball before the third or fourth quarter. Then when they did try to get Green involved, we ended up with three trips down the court with either turnovers or blown layups.
The issue of layups and blown fast breaks is approaching disaster, imo. Splitter keeps missing layups way too often, Green and Leonard miss fast break opportunity layups virtually all the time, and Neal can't seem to move fast enough to create a fast break.
The fast break issue can be dealt with in practice, I think, but the Neal issue has to be addressed with some certainty. Last year Ginobili was hurt so much we had to rely on Neal as a backup pg, but he is not one and never will be, and forcing him into that position negates his strength as a player and puts us in very bad situations as a team. Whenever he is the only pg on the floor for us our offense falls apart, and the other's team's offensive players get a break on defense and start getting into a rhythm that nullifies what the first team has done to keep them under control.
The grade given to Tony should have been given to Jackson, imo, because he really did 'score in bunches' but then negated all of his good by giving the other team 5 points out of a ten point lead in the final minutes of a game. That is too stupid to rate anything above a C minus overall.