For the first time in nearly two decades, the San Antonio Spurs are staring down the barrel of a losing season. With the organization a couple of years removed now from their Big Three and Kawhi Leonard, the team that’s long been one of the few mainstays in the West’s postseason picture faces an uncertain future and difficult decisions ahead.
They currently sit at 6-13 on the season, so naturally, the rumors have been ramping up that they might consider embracing a full rebuild and thus parting ways with either one or both of DeMar DeRozan and LaMarcus Aldridge. The whispers around DeRozan, in particular, have increased in volume the past week.
But DeRozan, for his part, tried to throw water on those rumors recently, even after online sleuths noticed that he’d scrubbed his Instagram feed this week, interpreting that move as some sort of indication that a trade might be imminent. DeRozan responded to this with a diatribe against social media in general, then followed that up insisting that the Spurs’ season is still salvageable.
Via The San Antonio Express News:
“I don’t even like social media, honestly,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of social media, never been. To this day I always wish I had played in the ’90s so I wouldn’t deal with social media. I just let people talk. Me, personally, I hate it…If it wasn’t a need in 2019, I wouldn’t have it.”
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“Losing kind of heightens everything negatively,” he said. “The reality of it, it’s still November. We haven’t hit 2020 yet. We’ve still got an opportunity. All it takes is for us to play a couple good weeks of basketball and we’ll be right there.”
On the one hand, DeRozan is right. It’s still early, and after all, this is basically the same team that took the No. 1 Nuggets to seven games last spring. However, the landscape of the West has changed drastically in the past few months, and the organization will have to decide whether scrambling to try and make the playoffs is worth the effort in the long run. Either way, it’s clear where DeRozan stands, for now.
