RealGM

When: 10:30 PM ET, December 13, 2012
Where: Rose Garden, Portland, OR

Starting Lineups:

Spurs:
PG - Tony Parker
SG - Gary Neal
SF - Danny Green
PF - Tim Duncan
C - DeJuan Blair

Blazers:
PG - Damian Lillard
SG - Sasha Pavlovic
SF - Victor Claver
PF - LaMarcus Aldridge
C - J.J. Hickson

Well coming off a rough one to Utah to face a Blazers team that could be without Batum and Matthews.

The key to winning this one is going to be the bench. The Blazers have one of the weakest benches in the league and we need to take advantage of that.

Go Spurs!!

will tp/manu/td get major minutes coming off 2nd night of a b2b + ot?

Well, since it's a loss, I guess it's time to point out our weaknesses.

The obvious one is our defense. We don't play it consistently for long enough. It keeps on coming on stretches. There's too many breakdowns that resulted in wide open shots.

A problem that has been building lately is turnovers. We're averaging 2 more turnovers than last year. Today againts Portland is glaring. Main culprit IMO is Manu. When Parker turns the ball over, it's usually at the rim where he gets stripped. It doesn't always resulted in fastbreaks for the other team. Manu's turnovers are always where he forces a pass to the paint area for the bigs and then it got deflected. That turnover always results in fastbreaks. And Manu just really needs to start attacking the rim more. He's settling for 3 pointers and midrange shots.

But I will hand it to Portland and Utah. I think we played well enough to win, but they made some incredible shots. Againts Utah, it was Hayward who came out and exploded. Played extremely well. Againts Portland, Lilliard was just incredible. Parker looked like the rookie compared to Lilliard today. He was just on fire..

Plus, we've won 2 games on buzzer shots earlier this season. We're on the other end of those shots in these 2 games. So I'll accept it and move on.

Yeah we were kinda due for losses like this... with how well the eastern road trip went and beating LAL along with Memphis

Boston will be tough, but it'll be fun