After a dominant performance against the Loong-Lions from China, the Spurs didn\u2019t look ready to play at the start of the game tonight, and were really hurt by a lack of ball-handling skills with just about every guard on the team out with injuries. The starting guards were Julian Champagnie and Devin Vassell, neither of which is known for how well they perform with the ball in their hands. Miami coach Eric Spoelstra took advantage of the Spurs shortcomings and also threw a variety of junk defenses at Victor Wembanyama to keep him off balance. Kel-El Ware played out of his mind for most of the game, but the Spurs finally pulled out of their early funk in the last three minutes of the first half with a late 12-3 run and went into the locker room with a 61-57 lead.<\/p>\n
The Spurs played with a little more purpose to begin the second half as they stretched their lead to double digits until the Silver and Black went to their bench and the Heat rolled out a twin towers offense with Kel\u2019El Ware and Norman Powell. The Spurs led 86-80 with a quarter to play.<\/p>\n
Mitch had seen enough from the top players to start the fourth, and put out a Summer League squad for the rest of the contest. Even though the score was close, it felt like garbage time for both teams, except for Kel\u2019El Ware, who was padding stats against a bunch of guys who aren\u2019t going to ever see the court during the regular season unless the score is out of reach. The Heat finally took the lead on a Ware dunk assisted by Jakucionis. It looked like the Heat were going to win easily as they took the lead with 5 minutes left, and the Spurs were fielding a team mostly composed of Summer League players. Carter Bryant and the Spurs weren\u2019t in on that plan, as they shut down Miami and finally stopped Kel\u2019El Ware and scored the last 9 points of the game, winning 112-107. The win doesn\u2019t count in the standings, but it still has to feel good for the team as they stay undefeated in the preseason at 2-0.<\/p>\n
I looked through my PTR archive, and it turns out that I\u2019ve been writing stories for this site since March, 2014. That\u2019s a long time, and I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve really improved as a writer that much, but one thing I\u2019ve learned is to have fun and be yourself. I think that\u2019s probably a good tip for any sort of career where you\u2019re expected to do creative work. I\u2019m happy that Pounding the Rock has given me that opportunity. Some day, I\u2019ll move onto something else, but I\u2019m having too much fun with it to quit now.<\/p>\n
After tonight\u2019s game, the Spurs play at home against the Jazz on Friday, then have a home-and-home with the Indiana Pacers on Monday and Friday of next week to finish out the preseason. The regular season is just two weeks away, when the Spurs face the Mavericks in Dallas on October 22. We will get to see the top two picks in the 2025 draft face off, and that\u2019s a matchup you don\u2019t want to miss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a dominant performance against the Loong-Lions from China, the Spurs didn\u2019t look ready to play at the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":288666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,7202,7203,145911,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-288665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-san-antonio","10":"tag-sanantonio","11":"tag-spurs-game-recaps","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-tx","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115343020737597213","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}