Opinion | The San Antonio Spurs Player You're Not Hearing Enough About
For the Spurs to find success this year, one player may be as instrumental as Victor Wembanyama
Now, before we get carried away, the San Antonio Spurs will only go as far as Victor Wembanyama leads them. There’s no question he’s the catalyst of the team. There’s also no question that the team around him needs to get better. They’ve already started taking steps to ensure that happens by signing Chris Paul, trading for Harrison Barnes, and drafting Stephon Castle.
Here’s what I find to be the largest elephant in the room nobody is mentioning nearly enough: Zach Collins needs to step it up.
Fans and media tend to point to the Jeremy Sochan experiment and the overall lack of point guard play as the main reason for last season’s 22-60 record.
However, we can look at the Tre Jones-Wemby combination on the floor. Jones and Wembanyama outscored their opponents by an average 2.1 points per game out of 66 games played together.
When you exchange Wemby for Collins, the Spurs were outscored by their opponents by an average 1.8 points per game over 64 games.
In case you were wondering, all three of them on the floor together were at 0.1 in the span of 23 games.
Now let’s add in Devin Vassell into the equation. In 51 games together, the Tre-Vassell-Collins trio was a -0.9 per game. For Tre, Vassell, and Wemby, that number is 3.2 points per game over 55 games.
In fact, if you just want to look at five-man lineups, Zach Collins was part of 13 of them that appeared in at least 10 games together. Of those 13, only one was a plus net rating — and it was by a single point over 22 minutes in 11 games.
We can even get more blunt about the numbers for Collins and look at how his on/off net rating was -9.7 (meaning the Spurs were 9.7 points per 100 possessions worse when he played vs. when he didn’t).
Or, we can look at the 31.7% three-point percentage on 2.6 attempts per game. 2.3 of those attempts were wide-open (closest defender at least six feet away), and on those, Collins shot 34.2%. The other 0.3 attempts were merely open (defender four to six feet away), and he shot 10% on those.
One last point on the shooting woes of Collins. The Spurs were the ranked last on catch-and-shoot team on three pointers, shooting 35.4% on 27.9 attempts per game. 2.5 of Collins’ 2.6 attempts each game were considered catch-and-shoot attempts, and he shot a measly 32.2% on them.
For reference, Sochan, who is very much known as a non-shooter, shot 32.4% on his 2.4 catch-and-shoot attempts per game.
So this is what I find as a likely fact: If Zach Collins is merely an average player when Victor Wembanyama heads to the bench, the Spurs will find themselves in the playoffs — not play-in — playoffs. Everybody else on the team playing well will obviously help the cause, but nobody hurt the Spurs last season as much as Collins did.
Follow Casey Coggins at @caseylevane on X (formerly twitter)