What We Learned from the Spurs loss to the Rockets

Isn’t it great when your mood depends on the performance of your favorite team? It’s not a feeling I’ve experienced since abandoning fandom at school, but I empathize with those that do because the emotions and time they give a team matter. I even saw it up close with my mother recently, who has become a WNBA fan out of nowhere, and her spirits improved when her beloved Atlanta Dream got back in the win column in the Finals.

Fortunately for those who have suffered this, there are no “statements” in an opener and the first weeks of the season are filled with weirdness with some teams taking long to get settled and some of the bad ones briefly performing above expectation. This means it might take a team like the San Antonio Spurs some time to reach sixth gear because they are getting creative with a three-guard set in the starting unit and they don’t have a high level of urgency at all times, so nobody needs to overreact to some speed bumps.

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Anyways, the logistical casualty that caused us to wait three nights for the Spurs’ second game offered some time to watch the other teams and the Oklahoma City Thunder came up again in their winning effort against the Denver Nuggets on Thursday. There was a need to see if they could follow up their opening win by making another high-quality team look as ordinary as they did the Spurs, and for the most part, they did.

The Houston Rockets got checked out, too, and they looked mighty against the Dallas Mavericks. Some of the new swag was obvious when they played the Spurs because using another connector like Fred VanVleet added juice to the offense, but some of the extra intensity of the game was caused naturally by the matchup and its history. The battle for Texas supremacy is serious business and that was why the rebounding in the trenches looked like a mosh pit at times.

The team was down 10 points late in the third quarter, but never let the game get out of reach while not playing their style. As much as I am a fan of playing fast, the court was like a speedway in the third quarter, which will greatly diminish anyone’s legs, even if they have a fast set of…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/learned-spurs-loss-rockets-133000644.html

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Publish date : 2026-10-24 13:30:00

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