Team identity can be an elusive, fluid thing, and it’s hard to say how much having one even translates to winning actual basketball games. Still, the broad strokes of the 2018-19 Spurs as a collective unit are starting to reveal themselves as they hit something of a stride (they’ve now won 6 of their last 7 games) and smooth out the many defensive issues they were dealing with just a few weeks ago.
Even before their recent improvements on that end of the floor, there was a statistical throughline that set the 2018-19 Spurs apart from the league in an almost-too-Spursy way: plain old discipline.