While looking for an old article of mine to send to a friend, I ran across a post from August 2021 entitled A look at the 2024-2025 Spurs: A bit of hope for the future. The Spurs had just finished a 33-39 season in which they wound up 10th in the Western Conference. Their best players were Derrick White, Dejounte Murray and Jakob Poeltl, a far cry from the Big Three of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili that brought so much excitement and joy. Put simply, things were looking rather blah, with the 2014 Beautiful Game Spurs championship fading away in our rear view mirrors, getting fainter and fainter by the year.
However, an August 2021 article from The Athletic writer John Hollinger triggered both some hope and my article. Hollinger’s article looked forward to what is now the present 2024-2025 season and pointed out that the traditional powers would be saddled with aging superstars making huge dollars in the 2024-2025 season:
Imagine, if you will, the 2024-25 NBA season:
A 37-year-old Steph Curry is suited up for Golden State, making $55.8M, and still having a year left on his deal.
A 33-year-old Paul George is a Clipper, making $49 million. Lining up next to him, a 32-year-old Kawhi Leonard also making $49 million; by then there’s a good chance he will have inked a five-year extension that pays him 8 percent raises until age 35.
In Portland (OK, maybe not in Portland, but humor me), a 34-year-old Damian Lillard is raking in $49 million.
In Milwaukee, a 34-year-old Jrue Holiday is making $38 million with incentives that could take him to $40 million.
In Miami, a 35-year-old, balky-kneed Jimmy Butler will be making $48 million … and still having a year left on his deal.
The Lakers could very well be paying a 40-year-old LeBron James north of $50 million that season. L.A. can also look forward to a 2022-23 campaign where a 38-year-old James makes $45 million and a 34-year-old Russell Westbrook makes $47 million.
And in Brooklyn, a 36-year-old Kevin Durant is pulling down $51 million; if and when James Harden and Kyrie Irving extend their deals, they’ll take in about $100 million more between them. Those three will be a combined 104 years old and their contracts alone may be enough to put Brooklyn in the luxury tax.
Hollinger could not have known that only three of the ten stars in his 2021 summary would still be with the teams he listed in 2024-2025. He also could not have known that the two oldest players on the list, Curry and LeBron, would still be at or near the top of their games — with their teams happy to be paying them $50 million each. Most of the other players listed, while not on the same teams as in the summer of 2021, remain relatively effective players (ignoring of course Kyrie Irving’s recent ACL injury).
But the real point of his article was to focus on teams who, in the summer of 2021, looked to be well situated to succeed in 2024-2025 and beyond. His projection was based on both young players already on the teams and who also had draft capital to acquire other young players. While this post will focus on the Spurs part of Hollinger’s projections, and my comments on those projections, Hollinger listed four other teams who he projected to succeed:
A great many teams have set themselves up to be in a pronounced decline phase by mid-decade, while just a small handful — Memphis, Oklahoma City, Orlando, San Antonio and Toronto — seem to have their eyes on any achievement beyond the immediate here and now.
Hollinger clearly hit on three of the four non-Spurs teams on his list. OKC is now a juggernaut and probably the best team in the NBA, Memphis is a step behind but top four in the very competitive West, while Orlando has great young talent that just needs to learn how to shoot the basketball (admittedly an important skill for the game). He only missed on Toronto, which looks like a team headed back to the lottery, even though the bar to avoid the lottery in the East is very low: The Bulls are 27–38 and comfortably in the Play-in Tournament, 4.5 games ahead of the Raptors. The Bulls would be behind the Spurs in the West.
In my comments on the Hollinger article, with the admittedly absurd assumption that the Spurs would retain everyone on the roster as of August 2021, I listed the Spurs players with their age starting the 2024-2025 season:
Here are the 2024-2025 San Antonio Spurs in alphabetical order, with the age listed as of the start of that future season:
Zach Collins (26)
Drew Eubanks (27)
Keldon Johnson (24)
Tre Jones (24)
Jock Landale (28)
Dejounte Murray (27)
Jakob Poeltl (28)
Joshua Primo (21)
Luka Samanic (24)
Devin Vassell (23)
Lonnie Walker IV (25)
Derrick White (30)
Joe Wieskamp (24)
Only hard-core Spurs fans will remember all of those players, even though it was not that long ago. Only two of those players remain with the team – Keldon Johnson and Devin Vassell. Of the others, I made one wildly optimistic comment: “Joshua Primo will be only 21 and possibly on his way to stardom.” Although I didn’t comment on him in that particular post, some of us also had high hopes that Lonnie Walker IV would become an excellent player. Unfortunately, Lonnie’s flashes of brilliance remained mere flashes. Derrick White has done the best of the crew, becoming an integral piece on a championship team and a player who would help any team. Good for you, Derrick.
But one part of my optimistic projections from 2021 has come true, more than Spurs fans could have hoped. I wrote:
While that might be optimistic, if not unrealistic, remember that the Spurs have retained all their future picks plus some extras. The players that come out of those upcoming draft picks are not included in this analysis. In other words, while the Spurs might not keep all of these players listed below, this list does not include any of the future Spurs draft picks. It also does not include any free agents that the Spurs might add.
One of those free agents added to the team is De’Aaron Fox, who is both young and very talented. The draft picks include Stephon Castle, Jeremy Sochan and a young guy from France who was only 17 when Hollinger and I were making our projections. So yes, the optimism I felt in August 2021 turned out to be justified, even if it included some luck in the lottery. Good things happen to good people, and the Spurs have always been “good people”.