As Charlie Thaddeus so eloquently put it in What We Learned, there are two extreme directions that the Spurs’ 103-96 defeat to the Lakers seems to be pulling the emotions. One is down: with the idea that the Spurs ceiling is still limited by their best players, and the other is up: this was a winnable game against what should be a contender that again flashed the potential the of Spurs’ youth to raise that ceiling down the line, be it this season or the next.
Had a few things gone differently — a few more threes bounce in rather than out, maybe one or both of the two borderline goaltending calls in the first half go the Spurs way, players don’t collide on uncontested rebounds, etc — we would be looking at this game very differently.