New Fox/Castle debate among Spurs fans completely misses the biggest point

One loss in 11 games, and Spurs fans have been at each other's throats over Stephon Castle and De'Aaron Fox. Neither player did anything of note in the loss to the Knicks on Sunday, but the result of that was a shared loss. You would think that they were wearing opposing colors or something, the way this bickering has sounded.

The Twitter user above (yes, I'm still calling it Twitter) is correct to call out people claiming to not be impressed by De'Aaron Fox. It's not easy to accept a reduced role when you're in the prime of your career and the players you're allowing to lead the offense are young and raw. His sacrifice has been an integral part of the team's success, but what happened in Zach's comment section was absurd.

"Major cope. Castle is the 2nd best player," one user wrote. "Castle's been real close man idk," spewed another. As if the point of the original post was to determine a pecking order. These remarks and others of a similar ilk completely miss the boat on what San Antonio's true strength and culture are: sacrifice and selflessness. It doesn't matter who the second best player is. Not even a little bit.

The Spurs thrive because they don't get caught up in ego wars

The fans should be taking their cues from an organization that brought Manu Ginobili off the bench. Some nights, months, or seasons, there could have been debates over whether the Argentinian savant was better than Tony Parker, but that would have been the most irrelevant use of time Spurs Nation could think of.

These teams are always the sum of their parts with an added top-heavy element due to how well they work together. There are some folks outside of San Antonio who never even believed Parker and Ginobili were hall of fame level talents, but that didn't matter when you got on the floor with them.

No matter what you believed, you had to beat them in a game of basketball—a tall task for most. Opponents struggled to do so for the duration of their time spent together in a silver and black uniform because when TP was off, Ginobili would go ballistic and vice versa. I need the argumentative side of the fan base to remember that.

These guys aren't competing with each other. Whether Fox or Castle is better is a nonfactor because they both want to win games for the same team, and they're effective at getting that done. It's fair to criticize players when they underperform, but we don't need to assign blame and start tearing down one guy's value to uplift another.

The team just came off an 11-game winning streak, and fans are at each other's necks because of one loss? That's not the Spurs way. Clean it up, folks.