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What: Phoenix Suns vs. San Antonio Spurs
Where: Unnamed Arena in Phoenix - Phoenix, AZ
When: 7:00 p.m. (AZ Time)
Watch: Suns.com (Rise Network with Greg Esposito & Jon Bloom on the call)
Listen: AZ Sports 98.7 FM
Let's not over think this, but it is still the Spurs, right? Well, yes and no:
No Tim Duncan. No Manu Ginobili. No Tony Parker. No Kawhi Leonard. No Patty Mills. No Tiago Splitter. No Coach Greg Popovich.
Looks like this will be (finally) the time for Cory Joseph, Danny Green, and Matt Bonner to step out of the shadows of the Big Three and become their own version of that. Throw in Boris Diaw for a Big Four. They will be The Big 2.0 and carry the Spurs franchise for years and years to come. I can see it now.
So when Jim Boylen grabs that clipboard and looks across the bench at Ettore Messina, Becky Hammond, and former Blazer Ime Udoka with a barrage of bench players it will not quite feel the same.
For the Suns this needs to be a business endeavor. As of this moment the team is averaging 20.3 turnovers per game in the pre-season which would lead the entire league (in a bad way) if this was still the 2013-2014 season. Last year they averaged 14.8 turnovers per game and right now they look like a team that does not have the cohesion or chemistry to start a regular season right now. There is a lot of work to be done here.
Since the pre-season has very little merit for overall season success lets look at this game as an opportunity for improvement for certain players on the Suns roster:
- Goran Dragic, Eric Bledsoe, and Isaiah Thomas: Focus on hitting the roller and the corner man on the weak side to start getting more of a flow on offense.
- Continued: Less one-on-one stuff. There is plenty of time for that in the regular season, let's focus on running some offense here to get the role players some confidence and a rhythm.
- Miles Plumlee: Rebound the ball.
- Isaiah Thomas, Gerald Green, and Anthony Tolliver: Play them together. That unit needs to develop chemistry to be the weapon we are all expecting them to be in the regular season.
That is all. Let's play some basketball tonight.