It was supposed to be the gift that kept on giving long after the Spurs left the NBA bubble last summer.
Upon the team’s arrival in Orlando, Fla., for the reboot of the 2019-20 season, guard Patty Mills presented teammate Rudy Gay with a motorized scooter to help him navigate the Disney World campus.
The oldest player among the Spurs’ traveling party appreciated the gesture.
Gay meant to keep using the scooter once he was back in the real world. One problem.
“I left the charger in the bubble,” the 34-year-old Gay said. “I looked on Amazon and can’t find one.”
With the dawn of a new campaign looming, the Spurs hope that is all they have forgotten in the Orlando bubble.
Like Gay, the Spurs as a team uncovered a new way to get around during the eight-game NBA reboot in August.
Coach Gregg Popovich went younger, smaller and faster with his lineups, encouraging players to move at a faster tempo, with more freedom and fewer play calls, less structure and more controlled chaos.
The approach worked well enough during the small sample size laboratory in Orlando that Popovich aims to incorporate it throughout the 72-game schedule to come.
“The strategy, the philosophy, the way we play is going to stay the same, and everybody is going to have to adjust to that,” Popovich said. “We’re going to move forward from what we did there.”
The Spurs’ summertime shift in style was borne partly out of necessity and partly out of the liberty that comes with nothing to lose.
The Spurs arrived in Orlando nine games under .500, a playoff long shot and without All-Star big man LaMarcus Aldridge, whose season ended with shoulder surgery in April.
With development the primary goal, Popovich unleashed a young backcourt of 20-somethings in Dejounte Murray, Derrick White and Lonnie Walker, moved All-Star guard DeMar DeRozan to power forward and started 24-year-old Jakob Poeltl at center.
Popovich also relied heavily in rookie Keldon Johnson off the bench.
“It’s a fun way to play, an exciting way to play,” said Mills, the Spurs’ longest-tenured player, who appeared in only three of the eight games in Orlando. “It was fun to see how the young guys rallied around that style of play.”
The new-look Spurs went 5-2 to begin their Orlando experiment, then dropped the finale 118-112 to Utah as Popovich benched several regulars with the postseason mathematically out of reach.
Already a top-10 offense before the start of the bubble, the Spurs increased their offensive rating by nearly three points in eight restart games, bumping up to 114.7 points per 100 possessions.
Even their defense — which ranked 24th for the entire season — improved slightly, allowing 111.2 points per 100 possessions in Orlando.
“I think we were just more comfortable and free in a sense, just being thrown out there to figure it out on the go,” said DeRozan, who led the Spurs at 21.7 points per game in the bubble. “Our preparation before we started those bubble games made it a lot more exciting to go out there and play freely, and it showed.”
The new approach took a commitment from Popovich to take his hands off the play-calling reins and live with the mistakes that come with young players figuring things out on the fly.
There is no designated “point guard.” In general, whichever wing player snagged a defensive rebound was free to push the ball and go.
“We still had a lot of play calls, but Pop is just going to let everybody loose,” Murray said.
Such surrender of control was out of character for the Spurs coach, who is entering his 25th season.
“That’s not Pop,” Murray said. “He’s used to having the same team. He put confidence from the young guys to the old guys, and the old guys to the young guys. It was great for all of us.”
After the NBA went on hiatus in March, Popovich and his staff began plotting what the team should look like if and when play resumed.
There formed a general consensus that the team’s usual manner of playing, built around isolated plays for star scorers DeRozan and Aldridge, wasn’t going to cut it.
With the postseason already all but out of reach before the team’s masked-up flight left for Florida, and with Aldridge unavailable anyhow, the Spurs coaches decided there was no better time to try something new.
The beauty of the Spurs’ bubble ball approach lied in its egalitarianism.
Seven players who appeared in at least five games averaged double figures. Five of them — DeRozan, White, Gay, Johnson, Murray and the departed Marco Belinelli — averaged at least 12 points.
“You might score 20 tonight, he might score 10, he might score 30. Whatever,” Murray said. “At the end of the day, we want to win.”
There are, of course, questions as to whether the Spurs truly will be able to import their new, up-tempo offense with them back from Orlando — or if it will wind up left behind alongside Gay’s scooter charger.
A healthy Aldridge is back and ready to fill the starting spot occupied by Poeltl in the bubble. DeRozan could find himself exploited by the NBA’s bigger power forwards.
Opposing teams ambushed by the Spurs’ revamped attack in Orlando will be more prepared for it this season.
The Spurs’ training camp injury report — which features White (toe) and Johnson (foot) — likely will render two players prominent in the team’s bubble success sidelined for the start of the regular season.
As Murray put it, “The bubble was eight games. The NBA is a long season.”
Despite the obstacles and caveats, the Spurs aim to move ahead with their plan to bring bubble ball into a full regular season.
The way they see it, it is a souvenir worth bringing back from Disney World. If they can.
“We’re going to have the same goal as in the bubble,” Murray said. “It might be his night, or his night, or someone else’s. Let’s go defend, play together, and try to get as many wins and get better.”
jmcdonald@express-news.net
Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN
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