Game 5: San Antonio Spurs (2-2) @ Phoenix Suns (2-2) l Thursday l 7:00pm l NBATV

[grumpysaddle]

When you blow your salary cap on 3 stars, that is exactly what you have - 3 stars. You don't have a team, you have 3 stars in a 5 man game.....oh, wait, you don't even have 3....single digit IQ is required to understand this.
It is laughable to make excuses like the ones i see here:
1. oH, bUt It iS oNlY fIvE GamEs - no, it is not five games! With your 3 stars and with everyone crowning the Suns before the season started, you may have excuse to lose by 1-2 points from Denver, Boston, GSW maybe.....you don't have an excuse losing twice to the worst team from last season and to the Fakers.....
2. oH, bUt tHe ReSt dIdn''T sTeP uP - of course they didn't....that's the roster. Today's "stars" play alone, hog the ball and do iso and the Suns have 3 of those.....no, you are being served exactly what you ordered. There are no players on the roster who can or should step up and this is by design!
End of rant.

Booker literally had 13 assists, homeslice.

[sunsbg]

When you blow your salary cap on 3 stars, that is exactly what you have - 3 stars. You don't have a team, you have 3 stars in a 5 man game.....oh, wait, you don't even have 3....single digit IQ is required to understand this.
It is laughable to make excuses like the ones i see here:
1. oH, bUt It iS oNlY fIvE GamEs - no, it is not five games! With your 3 stars and with everyone crowning the Suns before the season started, you may have excuse to lose by 1-2 points from Denver, Boston, GSW maybe.....you don't have an excuse losing twice to the worst team from last season and to the Fakers.....
2. oH, bUt tHe ReSt dIdn''T sTeP uP - of course they didn't....that's the roster. Today's "stars" play alone, hog the ball and do iso and the Suns have 3 of those.....no, you are being served exactly what you ordered. There are no players on the roster who can or should step up and this is by design!
End of rant.

Booker literally had 13 assists, homeslice.

Ball movement looked worse than last two games though. Role players are just waiting for Book to create for them. We need a real offense, not some ISO bs.

[Hitachi77]

We had a really good offensive game. Check the numbers. Everything was good except FT%, and turnovers (ok this we need to clean up). We lost the game on defense though. Is it concerning? Of course. But hopefully this is where our coach makes his money. Gotta mix it up against the great bigs, as that is our biggest weakness. Double, rough them up, play some zone of our own.

Also though Spurs seemed to play out of their mind, confident as hell after the comeback win. Oh well onto the next. Not going to give up after 5 games. Just win the first ever in season tourney, no biggie.

[sashaturiaf]

We’re gonna miss Ayton. That’s all I have to say about this game

Ayton would have done nothing against Wemby, Ayton's best asset is his size and Wemby would have made him look like a schoolkid out there.

Only takeaway from this game is the NBA is all in trouble once Spurs get some other pieces alongside Wembayama, he is just ridiculous. I've never seen anyone make KD look helpless but here we are, 19 yo in his 5th game and he was the best player on the court. Wow

[Sunlight]

It was amazing to almost experience a championship and then have the most talented scorer of all time on your team. Many fans will never experience anything like this. Head up and forward.

[Calvin Klein]

Booker is amazing. Too bad he bought into the superteam BS (or maybe he didn't have much of a choice). Hopefully they will merge and play as a proper team. It's early still...

[ImNotMcDiSwear]

Wemby's hand is atop our title window, and everyone else's. It's closing faster than I expected. I thought it would take another year for him to get where he evidently already is.

Step aside, GOATs!

[sunsbg]

Wemby looked raw in the previous games but Suns made sure to get the boy some confidence by defending him with .. Eric Gordon. Check the highlights to see how many times he scored on EG. What a revolutionary defensive strategy from Vogel. Yeah I'm sure DA would have done worse. Mavs fans were so happy after Lively outplayed VW in their first game. They have someone to slow him down over next decade. Suns have nobody.

[Maze]

Wemby's going to be an awesome player, but I hate NBA politics.They're already giving him a HOF whistle.It's like geez, try not to make it so obvious.

[Calvin Klein]

Wemby's going to be an awesome player, but I hate NBA politics.They're already giving him a HOF whistle.It's like geez, try not to make it so obvious.

They will do what it takes to hype whoever player people are excited to see. It's always happened but it gets worse each year.

[garrick]

We’re gonna miss Ayton. That’s all I have to say about this game

Ayton would have done nothing against Wemby, Ayton's best asset is his size and Wemby would have made him look like a schoolkid out there.

Only takeaway from this game is the NBA is all in trouble once Spurs get some other pieces alongside Wembayama, he is just ridiculous. I've never seen anyone make KD look helpless but here we are, 19 yo in his 5th game and he was the best player on the court. Wow

Wemby hasn't filled out so he can't always use his extreme length to just out jump everyone yet.

Ayton would have been able to body him up better than whoever we put on him but it wasn't so much Nurkic or Eubanks though we had EG and KBD guarding him a lot of times.

With Nurkic just being played off the floor and Eubanks putting up a stinker Ayton would have fared a lot better but he isn't on the team anymore and Nurkic was the center that Ishbia wanted.

[Slim Charless]

Wemby's going to be an awesome player, but I hate NBA politics.They're already giving him a HOF whistle.It's like geez, try not to make it so obvious.

They will do what it takes to hype whoever player people are excited to see. It's always happened but it gets worse each year.

Suns hit 16 of 32 3 point attempts. Three pointers were not the reason the Suns lost tonight.

Nurkic also doesn't call himself "DominAyton" only to sit out a close-out game in the playoffs with a minor rib ouchie that no one knew about. He also makes like half the money Ayton does and wasn't the franchises only number 1 pick.

Do you have any comments on Nurk's play though ?

It wasn't his best game. It happens. He also seems to have the softest whistle in the league.

Here we go with the excuses. All of what you guys said could be true. Or, and stay with me here: Nurk is slow, unathletic and can't move/cover ground fast enough against today's bigs. Also a liability in the pnr and when attacked at the point as Lebron proved in the Laker game.

Doesn't matter, like I said you guys will all get here with me eventually. Just like you all did with Monty. Just a matter of time. Hopefully this won't be bad enough to derail the Finals as we're good enough everywhere else.

[Jesus_H_Macy]

The sample size is too small to really say anything about this team going forward (has been at times impressive but mostly uninspiring) but one thing I think you can say after any amount of games: champions don’t get down by 30 points at halftime on their home courts. That alone bodes extremely poorly for this season. You can “one game” it all you want but you know the best teams never let that happen

[Saberestar]

When you blow your salary cap on 3 stars, that is exactly what you have - 3 stars. You don't have a team, you have 3 stars in a 5 man game.....oh, wait, you don't even have 3....single digit IQ is required to understand this.
It is laughable to make excuses like the ones i see here:
1. oH, bUt It iS oNlY fIvE GamEs - no, it is not five games! With your 3 stars and with everyone crowning the Suns before the season started, you may have excuse to lose by 1-2 points from Denver, Boston, GSW maybe.....you don't have an excuse losing twice to the worst team from last season and to the Fakers.....
2. oH, bUt tHe ReSt dIdn''T sTeP uP - of course they didn't....that's the roster. Today's "stars" play alone, hog the ball and do iso and the Suns have 3 of those.....no, you are being served exactly what you ordered. There are no players on the roster who can or should step up and this is by design!
End of rant.

Every contender has their money basically tied to 3 players, I don't know why you can't see that.

Murray, Jokic, Porter on the Nuggets. You can add Gordon like we can add Nurkic to that equation.

Anteto, Lillard, Middleton. And the list goes on and on. Some teams only have two (Dallas with Luka and Kyrie, Lakers with LeBron and AD, ...) but you have to understand that is because they couldn't get a third star, not because they wanted to spread salaries lol.

Look, this roster is great and we are truly contenders. Yeah, we lost to the Spurs but it's not the end of the world, they have a legendary young talent on their roster and they are better than some people want to think about them.

[Hitachi77]

The sample size is too small to really say anything about this team going forward (has been at times impressive but mostly uninspiring) but one thing I think you can say after any amount of games: champions don’t get down by 30 points at halftime on their home courts. That alone bodes extremely poorly for this season. You can “one game” it all you want but you know the best teams never let that happen

Eh, the ‘19 Warriors got blown out a million times. Championship teams tend to worry about the long game, not a given half.

There was actually something encouraging about the comeback to tie it, and even having a go ahead 3 rim out. I would have been more concerned had they just thrown in the towel, as so many teams do.

My main take away is that we need to play better on defense. Our coach needs to find a way to better handle the great bigs, as that’s what we would have to go through to win a title. That should be his strength. We will never shut them down, but we just need to play a little better defense than the other team does.

[Calvin Klein]

Wemby's going to be an awesome player, but I hate NBA politics.They're already giving him a HOF whistle.It's like geez, try not to make it so obvious.

They will do what it takes to hype whoever player people are excited to see. It's always happened but it gets worse each year.

Do you have any comments on Nurk's play though ?

It wasn't his best game. It happens. He also seems to have the softest whistle in the league.

Here we go with the excuses. All of what you guys said could be true. Or, and stay with me here: Nurk is slow, unathletic and can't move/cover ground fast enough against today's bigs. Also a liability in the pnr and when attacked at the point as Lebron proved in the Laker game.

Doesn't matter, like I said you guys will all get here with me eventually. Just like you all did with Monty. Just a matter of time. Hopefully this won't be bad enough to derail the Finals as we're good enough everywhere else.

oh, dont get me wrong. We didn't lose because of the refs. The team is terrible so far. But the superstar calls are a reality.

I don't five a **** about Nurkic. I don't think he is a great player and he definitely has many flaws. I've even said he will probably be benched many times.

[KdoubleDees23]

We’re gonna miss Ayton. That’s all I have to say about this game

Ayton would have done nothing against Wemby, Ayton's best asset is his size and Wemby would have made him look like a schoolkid out there.

Only takeaway from this game is the NBA is all in trouble once Spurs get some other pieces alongside Wembayama, he is just ridiculous. I've never seen anyone make KD look helpless but here we are, 19 yo in his 5th game and he was the best player on the court. Wow

Wemby hasn't filled out so he can't always use his extreme length to just out jump everyone yet.

Ayton would have been able to body him up better than whoever we put on him but it wasn't so much Nurkic or Eubanks though we had EG and KBD guarding him a lot of times.

With Nurkic just being played off the floor and Eubanks putting up a stinker Ayton would have fared a lot better but he isn't on the team anymore and Nurkic was the center that Ishbia wanted.

Yeah pretty dumb take here. Ayton would have done better than Nurkic and eubanks

[handsome salary]

The sample size is too small to really say anything about this team going forward (has been at times impressive but mostly uninspiring) but one thing I think you can say after any amount of games: champions don’t get down by 30 points at halftime on their home courts. That alone bodes extremely poorly for this season. You can “one game” it all you want but you know the best teams never let that happen

It's happened before(cough...past two playoffs).

The only ones left, Book and Jones, still seem to have the same problems as the past three seasons. Maybe one can't lead a championship team and one can't construct a one.

I dunno, its still early I guess.

[Fifii]

Another L and main source her is Vogel.

He had two of our big three players and what we saw ? Sloppy first half and chasing on second.

Gordon was tragic in defense. In offense no revelation.

Yuta unfortunately miss two huge shoot in last m in of the game.

Shine Okogie went off after two games. That is why he played small min in this game.

Booker almost triple double but how it that we lose. He played terrible first half and brilliant second. Kevin reverse.

Finally good game from Drew but It was very suspicious that he played finally min in 4Q than Nurkic. Really I don’t know why.

One good thing Vogel did it was play KBD. He is huge upgrade on defense than Little and offense because he can do more than make wide open three. Anyways he can’t shoot three but it doesn’t matter when around him run shooters.

[enigmatics]

Suns hit 16 of 32 3 point attempts. Three pointers were not the reason the Suns lost tonight.

Nurkic also doesn't call himself "DominAyton" only to sit out a close-out game in the playoffs with a minor rib ouchie that no one knew about. He also makes like half the money Ayton does and wasn't the franchises only number 1 pick.

Do you have any comments on Nurk's play though ?

What's there to comment on?

Based on all accounts he sat most of the 1st half due to bad fouls called on him. In the 2nd half when they were down by almost 20 they went with more offensive fire power to try and get back in the game and I don't blame them.

We know what this CENTER situation is - which is why they have two guys depending on the matchups. Guys who are buying into their roles and who aren't complaining. It does not matter what Premature EvacuAyton would or would not have done - HE DIDN'T WANT TO BE HERE AND ISN'T HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm all for criticism, as no player or coach is above it. But for FFS people need to chill out on extrapolating an entire season from what you're watching right now. Did everyone really think this team was going to waltz in with 10+ new players, a new coach, a new scheme, and then injuries to start the year thinking they'd click on all ELITE cylinders? Respectfully, anyone who thought that is brainless.

They've shown that they can be a team who competes at a high level dominating the other opponent - even with Book/Beal out. They've also shown their lack of familiarity with each other and struggling with assignments/turnovers. This is going to take time to see what they're forged into. If someone can't accept that - their insufferable asses shouldn't tune in for the rest of the season.