For San Antonio Spurs, Ripping off the band-aid will hurt

For the San Antonio Spurs, the season is wide-open

For the players and fans, it's going to be very exciting to watch this group grow and learn from each other and see who will step up in certain situations. Who will take the last shot? Who will get them a bucket when they need to stop the bleeding? Who will get a stop when they need one? These questions will hopefully be answered come this season.

Ripping off the band-aid more specifically means this young group is going to have to learn through their own mistakes. That may mean losing a lot of games this season and things getting worse before they can get better. The only way the Spurs can make it back into the playoffs this upcoming season is if multiple players have breakout seasons. This could be any combination of Lonnie, Derrick, Dejounte, or Keldon among others, but if none of them are able to have that breakout season, it could be a long year.

No one around the league and no one outside the city of San Antonio is going to give this Spurs group a snowball's chance in hell at winning anything. With the preseason being just around the corner, 2021-22 season predictions are going to come with it.

If the past couple of seasons are any indicator, every "expert" for every major sports media outlet is going to have the Spurs at the bottom of the barrel, probably deservingly so. Vegas already recently came out with their over/under odds at total wins for the season for the Spurs at 28.5.

This young Spurs team is going to have to earn every ounce of respect from the rest of the league. For twenty years, it was just a given that Coach Pop's team would win 50-plus games and be in contention for a title. That hasn't been the case for years now. The Spurs front office has still been busy continually acquiring draft compensation possibly in hopes of making a big splash in the trade market for a star player like Ben Simmons.

For Spurs fans, it's probably not worth getting your hopes up for that to happen. The Sixers still seem to be demanding a king's ransom for their three-time All-Star, and as much as I'd love Ben Simmons on the Spurs, he's not worth gutting most of the core roster for. If the Sixers ask for even half of some of these ridiculous trade offers we are seeing from Bleacher Report among other websites, it's likely the Spurs will turn them down, and rightfully so.