San Antonio runs into zoning restrictions in first game of tournament play.

After the game in New York on Wednesday, Gregg Popovich was shown by ESPN’s cameras going over to shake hands with Knick’s coach Tom Thibodeau. During the exchange, he can be seen smiling and saying, “It’s going to take some time.”

Uggggggggghhhhhhh.

It’s like he hasn’t even considered my feelings on the matter. What if I would like them to be good now? What if I would prefer that things didn’t take time? What if I watched one game against a Phoenix team (that clearly is going through some weird growing pains of it’s own) and decided to just throw all my carefully calculated expectations out the window and just lose my mind a little bit? Did Gregg think about any of that? Unacceptable.

So yea. Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more. Our season is probably going to be littered with little losing streaks like this. There’s going to be some blow outs. There’s going to be some blown leads. There’s going to be some nights where our boys are asked to deal with a 2-3 zone for a little bit and just completely forget how to shoot the basketball in the process. It’s okay. It happens. We’re going to be fine.

It’s frustrating, for sure, because you watch Victor Wembanyama out there on the floor doing some of the things he’s capable of doing and you just want to….I don’t know, do something crazy? It makes you wish the team had sent half our guys out to get Dame or put together draft picks for Beal or paid 20 cents on the dollar for Harden (lol, jk, not that. Never that). I don’t even remember what all was available last summer, but you keep hearing all these people saying the Spurs didn’t want to leverage their future for this season and, well, WHY NOT? LEVERAGE IT FOR THE NOW! I WANT TO WIN NOW!

This is categorically stupid. It’s galactically insane. I know this and I recognize this and I hope all of us feel it somewhere deep in our hearts as we’re watching the Spurs let another lead slip through their fingers. It’s easy to get impatient, but a beautiful twist of fate has handed us the opportunity to do something special here and it is so important that it’s done right. Do you think Cleveland is super satisfied with the one championship they won with LeBron? Remember that? How they had a generational superstar who grew up in their backyard and still only won one championship with them before leaving (again) for the Lakers? This can go wrong and it can end badly and it would emotionally devastating on a level I’m not totally prepared to think about right now.

So we’re not going to rush it. We’re going to build and we’re going to work and we’re going to “pound the rock”, as they say, and we’re going to get where we need to go. It’s not going to look like a finished product most nights and we’re just going to have be okay with it. It’s going to take some time.

It’ll be worth it.

Takeaways:

• I’m going to fight Bill Simmons in The Octagon. I know Spurs fans have their own little internal debate going on about the Point Sochan experience, but that’s our cross to bear because we have to watch and care about these nerds every day. Simmons parachuting into Spurs World here for the first time since 2017 and deciding to dedicate 5 minutes of every NBA pod he does to cry about how the Spurs are wasting Wembanyama’s career by not getting him a real Point Guard might drive me off a cliff. Frankly, it’s radicalized me fully into becoming a Point Sochan Guy. I’m all in. It is so blindingly obvious that they are betting on Jeremy becoming a vital cog in the Spurs machine down the road and that getting him point guard reps right now, in a season where the record doesn’t matter mind you, will pay huge dividends down the road. NO ONE THINKS JEREMY SOCHAN IS THE POINT GUARD OF THE FUTURE. Oh, did he have a couple of turnovers in a game that doesn’t materially matter in the grand scheme of things? Well then, yes, by all means, let’s blow everything up and go get T.J. McConnell.